


The Future is Us

by Crockzilla, SpaceTrash (DesolateHappiness)



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Deadpool - All Media Types, Spider-Man - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Action/Adventure, Adventure & Romance, Age Difference, Alternate Universe, Anal Sex, Angst, Crying, Explicit rating for later chapters, Friends to Lovers, Historical Accuracy, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Magic Nazis, Oral Sex, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Pining, Spanking, Time Travel, Wade Wilson Needs A Hug, Whump, World War II, badass nat, sci fi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-28
Updated: 2018-07-08
Packaged: 2019-05-29 21:17:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 38,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15081920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crockzilla/pseuds/Crockzilla, https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesolateHappiness/pseuds/SpaceTrash
Summary: Spideypool Big Bang Prompt #9:"Peter Parker, the sickly Brooklyn boy and his best friend Wade Wilson, manage to get by when WWII rolls around the corner and Wade, who's a little older and a lot healthier, has to join the army. Peter, left behind, volunteers for a super secret Super Soldier Program.But just when things look a little better and he's with his best friend and secret love interest again, Wade is captured by the Nazis and experimented on, until they meet again in the far future of 2016, Wade brain-washed and a trained assassin, while Peter became the symbol of a whole nation."





	1. Chapter 1

Peter could barely see -- he just let his rage guide him, let it move his arms, swinging and punching as hard and as fast as he could at the body underneath him. He knew he didn’t have long -- this kid was three times his size and was probably temporarily paralyzed by shock. Bullies were always shocked that a skinny, short, sickly little kid from Queens would have the balls to fight back instead of cower as they tortured him or someone else. Shock was really Peter’s only advantage -- that and his thick, numbing rage that helped him not feel fear or pain, at least for a while.

 

But as this bully came out of his initial shock and started trying to flip their positions, grabbing Peter’s slender wrist in one meaty hand, Peter felt his rage quickly give way to dread. Shit, this guy was huge.

 

“Peter!”

 

He turned around at the familiar voice and saw Wade, eyes blazing, coming quickly down the alley. He grabbed Peter by the shoulders and pulled him up off the bully in one swift movement. For a second, Peter thought Wade might put him over his knee like he had that one time when Peter was five and Wade had caught him trying to fight a ten year old. (Peter still thought about that incident. Frequently.)

 

“What are you doing?” Wade asked, holding him in place.

 

“He was picking on the Jewish kid!” Peter shouted, full of adrenaline from the fight and from being caught. “He’s an asshole!”

 

“Yeah, I figured,” Wade said, his voice taking on more of an edge. “What are you doing fighting him?”

 

Peter swallowed, trying to calm down. Wade looked genuinely angry, which made Peter’s stomach flip over -- he wasn’t out of knee-putting-over territory yet. But the harder he tried to come up with an excuse, with an argument for why he’d made the choice he had, the closer he felt himself get to tears and he was not going to cry, not in front of this son of a bitch, who was now sitting up but seemed once again frozen in shock.

 

Peter looked down and closed his eyes, tight, willing the hot tears to stay in them. He felt Wade’s grip on his shoulders change.

 

“I mean, you know how long it’s been since I got to beat the hell out of an anti-Semitic asshole.”

 

Peter opened his eyes and looked up to meet Wade’s bright blue ones. His friend gave him a wry smile before turning towards the bully, and Peter felt a thrill of satisfaction at the suddenly petrified looked on the asshole’s face.

 

“Now, wait just a goddamn minute --” he stuttered, scuttling to get up, but Wade was already dangerously close.

 

“Run,” Wade said, quietly. Peter had never seen someone so big move that fast, hurtling down the alleyway. No doubt he’d tell his asshole friends what had happened and they’d come after Peter later, but he and Wade had dealt with bigger and much more skilled gangs of bullies before.

 

“You gotta cut this shit out.”

 

Wade was checking him over, big strong hands feeling up Peter’s arms, turning his face by his chin to see the shiner that Peter could feel blooming over his left eye. “You shoulda just let him beat me up,” Peter said through gritted teeth. “I’m sixteen, I ought to take what’s coming to me.”

 

“Oh, sure,” Wade said, anger flashing in his eyes. “And what about me, when I hear you’re dead? In an alley? What about May?”

 

Peter felt like he’d been hit in the chest. Wade saw but didn’t back down, just held his gaze. He didn’t need to say anything else, just waited while Peter clenched his fists, trying to hang onto his rage, trying to keep his vivid imagination from showing him Wade’s face when he found Peter’s lifeless body, May’s face when they told her, just like when she’d found Ben except worse because Peter was all she had left.

 

Wade’s arms were around him before he fully realized he was sobbing. Then he was shaking, clutching Wade’s broad back, burying his face in Wade’s strong shoulder. It was entirely too familiar.

 

“I know,” Wade said, voice low and soothing. “I know, baby boy. It’s okay.”

 

Usually, when people said “I know” to him, Peter swiftly pointed out that no, they did not know. They did not know what it was like to lose both parents before they could read, and they did not know what it was like to lose the kindest man in the world because they were too small to protect him. But Wade was different, because he did know. He and May were the only ones in the world who understood the awful helplessness, the feeling of drowning in grief. And he’d almost done it to them again by getting himself killed.

 

“So does the Jewish kid have a name?” Wade asked as they walked away from the alley. “Besides The Jewish Kid?”

 

Peter shrugged. “I don’t know, I haven’t talked to him.”

 

“Well, maybe you should start there,” Wade suggested, cheerfully. His hands were in his pockets and he sort of swiveled his torso towards Peter. “Instead of attacking giant bullies, make friends with the kid. He can watch your back, let me have a break.”

 

Peter made a face but laughed. Wade had done this since he could remember, trying to get him to make friends with kids his age. People just didn’t take to Peter -- he was small, and he’d missed school quite a bit when he was younger because he’d been sick a lot, and when he was in school he was smart and none of these were things that endeared him to the other kids. Wade told him it was because of the great big chip on his shoulder, and maybe it was, but what did Peter care? Wade had never had any friends besides him, either, and Wade had always been tall for his age, and handsome, with his pretty blue eyes and thick blond hair and that easy smile. Wade was beautiful.

 

“I gotta keep you on your toes,” Peter quipped. “If you’re not constantly pulling my ass out of the fire you’ll get lazy. Don’t want that, do you?”

 

Wade slung an arm around his shoulders and Peter leaned into his big, strong side. Letting himself think that Wade was beautiful gave him a jolt, but it no longer made him feel sick with worry like it had a few years ago.

 

Another reason why Peter had no friends: he’d realized when he was eight that he paid as much attention to boys as he did to girls. He’d been twelve when he told Wade. Wade had nodded, sagely -- he’d been fifteen and basically a grownup. “That’s okay,” Wade had said. “Me, too.”

 

Peter had felt a weight lift off of his bony shoulders. He was just different the same way that Wade was, like always. That was fine.

 

He’d been fourteen when he told Wade that he was in love with him. Wade had looked strange for a moment -- not scared, right? Wade was never scared -- but then had struck one of his classic swaggery poses.

 

“Sure you are,” Wade had said, full of bravado. “Look at me -- you’d be crazy not to be in love with this.”

 

Peter had laughed, relieved, and Wade had ruffled his hair. It had not been the reaction he’d fantasized about, but it hadn’t been the one he dreaded, either.

 

But then Wade moved out. It had broken Ben and May’s hearts, but Wade had said he was moving back in with his old man to take care of him, so they’d let him go. Peter knew better. Wade wouldn’t get within five feet of that monster, Peter wouldn’t let him. He didn’t know exactly where Wade stayed, but he always looked healthy, if not quite as healthy as he’d looked those few years that he’d lived in the Parker household. Peter hadn’t spoken to him for two days after he moved out, but even then he’d understood why. Wade was a good boy -- a good man. He wasn’t about to bait a love-sick teenager.

 

Since then, he was just gone sometimes. Usually no longer than a couple of days, but recently he’d been gone for six weeks. Peter had counted. He and May had been ready to read him the riot act when he showed back up, but the second he’d walked into their tiny apartment, they both were too busy hugging him to stay mad.

 

Wade had stayed the night for the first time in a long time, and his long, muscular body next to Peter in the bed was like a balm on his soul. Wherever he’d been, because Wade had only said he’d been “taking care” of some things, he had come back even bigger and stronger. Or maybe Peter had just missed him.

 

He’d been home for almost a week now, and it was like he’d never been gone. In fact, he seemed to be around more than he had in a while.

 

“You coming for dinner?” Peter asked, trying to sound casual.

 

Wade shrugged, one big arm still around Peter’s thin shoulders. “Depends on what’s for dinner.”

 

Peter punched him lightly in the stomach, and Wade made a big show of doubling over. “Smart ass,” Peter grinned.

 

They were laughing, rounding the corner of Peter’s block when they almost ran smack into a man ringing a bell, wearing a sandwich board ordering them to Buy War Bonds. Peter frowned, quickening his pace.

 

“Whoa there, fella,” Wade laughed, tripping to catch up with him. “Where’s the fire?”

 

“Are you gonna get drafted?” The words had tumbled out of Peter’s mouth before he could stop them.

 

Wade kept walking, hands back in his pockets, thinking but trying not to look too serious. “Probably,” he said, “but all I have to do is act like I’m crazy and they won’t take me.”

 

“Hmph,” Peter frowned again, but the somewhat reasonable answer had gone a long way to calming him down. “Won’t be too much of a stretch.”

 

Wade popped him playfully on the ass, and Peter thought he should probably tell Wade to stop doing that, but it sent a jolt through his whole body that he liked very much. He took off and actually beat Wade to the steps of their walk-up for once.

 

Dinner was wonderful. May had made pot-roast, a favorite of both of “her boys” as she called them, and the three of them laughed more that night than Peter thought they probably had in years. He fell into bed pleasantly exhausted and was asleep almost before he could enjoy the comfort of knowing Wade was next to him. Wade even slung one arm over him and kissed his hair before starting to snore, which he hadn’t done in a long time.

 

Peter should have known the next day would be fucking horrible.

 

He had actually introduced himself to The Jewish Kid, whose name was Eddie and who turned out to be a good guy and kind of a hoot. Maybe this making friends thing wasn’t such a bad idea. He’d come straight home after school, hoping to get cleaned up before Wade came by, excited to tell him about the relatively nice day he’d had.

 

He barreled into his own room and stopped in his tracks. Wade was there, standing in his room, wearing a military dress uniform. Army, Peter recognized.

 

“I was at boot camp,” Wade said, sounding like he might be sick. “That’s where I was all that time. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

 

“You got your orders?” Peter heard himself say. He heard other kids whose big brothers and other male family members had enlisted already talk about “getting their orders” and suddenly leaving.

 

Wade nodded. Peter felt like he was melting, like he was frozen through and slowly dissolving into liquid. “Why?” he asked.

 

“It’s the right thing to do,” Wade said in a stranger’s voice.

 

“Bullshit,” Peter said, feeling a lump forming fast in his throat. Wade was leaving. Wade was leaving him. Today. Now. Forever. People were already dying far away, and now Wade would join them.

 

Wade’s chin trembled and he bit his lips to stop it. He opened his arms, his pretty blue eyes glassy with tears, and Peter couldn’t resist falling into them. He clung to Wade’s broad back, hating the stiff material that kept his fingers from digging into Wade’s skin. He tried to memorize the feeling of Wade’s body against his, the smell of him, the warmth of his skin, part of him knowing that this was very probably the last time even as the rest of him screamed no, no, please no.

 

“No beating up bullies while I’m gone,” Wade said, his voice relatively steady. “You’ve got to stay in one piece and take care of May.”

 

Peter tried to nod, but all he could do was press his face harder against Wade’s shoulder. This wasn’t happening. He was dreaming. He had to wake up.

 

“I want you to find a nice lady who doesn’t put up with your shit,” Wade said into his ear, “and have kids with her, and be stupidly happy. Okay, baby?”

 

Peter’s quick rage was suddenly triggered, and he pushed away with all of his might, nearly knocking them both down. “Fuck you,” he said. “You just don’t want to have to think of me here, miserable, while you go get yourself killed, and you won’t even tell me why.”

 

He wished Wade would shove him back, take a swing, get mad, but Wade never ever did things like that. Not towards Peter, anyway. He sat down heavily on the bed, and Peter could hear him sniffle even as he became aware of tears coursing down his own cheeks.

 

“Something’s wrong,” Peter hiccupped around a sob. “There’s something you’re not telling me, I know it. Why? Why are you doing this?”

 

Wade didn’t say anything, just continued to stare at the floor with his head down. Peter dropped to the ground and they both sat there for a while, letting out their misery. Peter couldn’t think of another moment in his life when one of them had cried when the other was nearby that they hadn’t comforted each other. It made him feel sick.

 

“I’m good at it,” Wade said with a tearful half-laugh. “The training to fight and kill people bit. So that’s something.”

 

“What is wrong?” Peter asked, glad that his determination was keeping his voice from shaking.

 

Wade shook his head, two more tears sliding silently down his face. There was something – that had sealed it. Peter went to him, knelt in front of him with his hands on Wade’s knees, made him look at him. “Tell me,” he insisted.

 

They held each other’s eyes for a long moment. “It’s my fault, what happened to Ben,” Wade said, finally. “If I hadn’t moved out, if I had been here, he’d be alive.”

 

Peter couldn’t breathe. He struggled to say something, to tell Wade that was ridiculous, certainly no reason to go to war, to get himself killed. Wade’s big, warm hands were on his shoulders. “You should hate me, Pete.”

 

Maybe because Wade was leaving, maybe because their faces were suddenly so close to each other that the distance wasn’t much to cross, Peter leaned in and kissed him. He had no idea what he was doing, but it lasted – Wade was still at first, but then he relaxed, his lips rough and sweet, opening just a little, just enough for their mouths to fit together. Peter could have died happy right then.

 

Then Wade gently applied pressure to his shoulders, pushing him back. Their foreheads rested together, their bodies rising and falling together with their breath.

 

“Don’t go,” Peter whispered, hating himself for sounding like a little kid. “Don’t.”

 

He heard Wade’s breath hitch, and Peter’s hands squeezed his forearms where they’d landed during the kiss. Then, Wade pressed a kiss to his forehead, stood, and walked out of the room, leaving Peter frozen, kneeling next to his own bed.

 

The next he heard from Wade was a letter, a week later, saying he was getting on a ship.


	2. Chapter 2

The second Peter turned eighteen, he tried to enlist. He went through the whole demoralizing health inspection to be told that he was too short, too weak, and had had too many childhood diseases. He wasn’t surprised. He didn’t want to be in the army, truth be told – Ben and May had always insisted that there were better ways of figuring things out than fighting people, and while their philosophy didn’t stop him from attacking bullies, it made him sick at the thought of carrying a gun.

But joining the military was the only way he could think of to see Wade again.

He had written at first. Those first few months Peter and May got a letter at least once a week. He couldn’t tell them everything, but he could tell them how he was feeling, how hard it was to sleep, how strange and funny the other guys in his platoon were, how much he missed cooking and eating with them. They would sit on their thread-bare sofa together and read every word, every single letter. And it did help.

Peter wrote to Wade every day. At first he wasn’t sure how quickly Wade would get his letters, or if he would get them at all. Not knowing where he was in the world was absolute torture. But the first time Wade had written and said that he’d gotten Peter’s letter, every one of them, it lit a torch in Peter’s insides that had felt so empty and dead since Wade had left him alone in his room. He wrote every day, and even if he didn’t get a letter in the mail he’d add to what he’d written and just send a long letter once he’d scrounged enough money for post.

He made extra by collecting metal scraps for the war effort, ostensibly out of a sense of patriotism, but really it was for Wade. Every piece of junk he dug out of the trash, he thought of it turning into a weapon, a shield, something for Wade to hold that would protect him since Peter couldn’t be there to do it himself. The money also helped make up for what they weren’t getting now that Wade wasn’t showing up with a surprise few bucks every now and then.

“I could quit school and get a factory job,” Peter suggested at dinner one night.

May raised an eyebrow at him over their meat-loaf, which was mostly crumbled up crackers and very little meat. “You’re about to graduate,” she reminded. “Worry about that first.”

She pressed a kiss to his forehead as they washed up a while later. “We’ll be okay, sweetheart. The war won’t last forever, and Wade will be back – we’ve just got to get through it, one day at a time.”

And he did. He tried to. He wrote down everything that happened to him, even the most mundane, telling himself that it was so Wade would be completely up to speed when he got home, so that they could pick up right where they left off.

But one day, he just – gave in. He told Wade everything. Not about the trivia of his day, not even about how worried he was that May was working so hard to make ends meet, but about what was inside of him. He told Wade every aching, burning thought he’d ever had about him, the things he hadn’t been able to keep out of his head since he’d left, what he wanted Wade to do to him, what he wanted to do to Wade. He left nothing out, just opened his heart and poured it onto the cheap, thin paper. He put it in the post before he could think better of it, because no matter how much May tried to comfort him, he knew there was a chance – better than a chance – that this was the only way that Wade would ever know how he felt.

Wade didn’t stop writing altogether at first. He said he got Peter’s letter, and he said he loved him, but he always said that. His letters started coming once every two weeks, once a month, and May said it was probably because he was being moved or he was in a remote place where he couldn’t get time or materials to write. Peter knew the real reason why, but he found he didn’t regret what he’d done. He couldn’t have kept it to himself.

Then Wade’s letters stopped coming at all.

“We’ll get one soon,” May said, rubbing his back in a way he’d found so comforting all his life but that wasn’t helping now. “Mrs. Allan said she didn’t hear from her granddaughter for three months, and she’s not even in combat.”

Three months came and went. It had been a little over a year and a half since Peter had seen Wade, over six months since they’d had a letter from him. Peter still wrote to him every day, still spent the money on postage, still sent him letters and hoped he got them.

After he was turned down the first time, Peter tried enlisting illegally. He was turned down again and again. _Get them to watch you handle some asshole picking on a kid_ , said the Wade voice in his head, the one that talked to him frequently these days. The thought made him smile, but he kept filling out the tedious forms and going through the demoralizing exams just to see 4F stamped in big red script.

He was on attempt number six when he met Dr. Curt Connors.

“You sure you’re eighteen?” Dr. Connors said, peering at him over his wire-rim spectacles.

Peter glared. He was tired of being asked about the one thing he wasn’t lying about on his forms. “Yes, I’m sure. Am I under arrest?”

His stomach had dropped into his shoes when the Military Police officer had appeared in the tiny exam room, but Dr. Connors had dismissed the officer as soon as he’d walked in. Still, it was strange, and Peter wanted out of there as quickly as possible.

“Not yet,” Dr. Connors said with a shrug. “But you could be.”

Peter looked at the folder the doctor was holding and saw that it contained every enlistment form he’d filled out. Shit. Were they honestly going to prosecute him for trying to get into the army to get himself killed?

“Arrest me or don’t, I need to get to work,” Peter said, sitting back in the wooden chair.

Dr. Connors smiled. “You don’t scare easy.”

Peter shrugged, not knowing what to say to that.

“You’ve been through the ringer,” Dr. Connors continued, looking down at his file. “Survived measles, survived scarlet fever, parents dead – both of them?”

“They were in Europe for the government,” he said, quietly. He didn’t like talking about it because he didn’t know much, because May and Ben didn’t know much, and it made him feel small and stupid. “MIA, presumed dead.”

Dr. Connors nodded, taping a pencil on Peter’s file with his single arm. Peter tried not to stare at the empty right sleeve of his lab coat which was rolled up and neatly pinned just under his shoulder.

“And your uncle was killed in your home? A robbery?”

Peter said nothing. He made himself nod.

“You may not look eighteen,” Dr. Connors said, “but you’ve got the life experience of a sixty-year-old, I’d say.”

“Why do you know all that?” Peter demanded, his temper flaring at being unexpectedly reminded of such things. “I’m just a broke kid from Queens who wants to join the army, and yeah I lied a few times, but surely you’ve got better things to do than nose around in my life.”

He expected, maybe hoped, that Dr. Connors would get angry, but his face remained neutral. He closed the folder, folded his hands over it, and looked Peter square in the eye. “I’d like to recruit you for a special project.”

Peter blinked. “For the military?”

“Not exactly,” Dr. Connors said, frowning as if deciding how to explain. “I’m with the Strategic Scientific Reserve. We’re affiliated with the U.S. government, but not just the U.S., all the Allied governments.”

He seemed to pause, as if waiting for Peter to say something. “Our job,” he continued when Peter just stared at him, “is to get ahead of the Nazis in ways that traditional militaries can’t. We’ve got the top scientists and strategic minds in the world, and we’re building an army that can stop Hitler, stop Mussolini, stop anyone like them who ever shows up again.”

“Like the Commandos?” Peter had heard of the special British forces tasked with carrying out high risk raids.

“Sort of,” the doctor answered, “except that this would involve experimental medical procedures.”

Oh, Peter thought, insides turning to ice. He’d heard of the experiments that had gone on during the first war, people trapped inside chambers and forced to breathe poison. “You want me to be a lab rat.”

“In a way,” Dr. Connors admitted, and Peter had to give him credit for not trying to bullshit him, “but if the experiment goes the way we’re hoping, the subject – you, or somebody else if you choose not to participate – would end up enhanced. A super soldier.”

Peter frowned. It had made sense to him that they’d want a little sickly guy for testing chemicals and the like, but this – “Why me?”

Dr. Connors drew in a breath, thinking. “Our operations manager is very interested in you. I’d like for you to meet her. I think she can explain best. Would you be willing?”

Her? “Sure,” he heard himself say. “Why not?”

Dr. Connors started to stand, but then paused, again looking like he was debating with himself. “Mr. Parker, I’d like to ask you a question.”

Peter had already stood up and now stopped, waiting awkwardly.

“Do you want to join the army,” he asked, choosing his words carefully, “because you’re angry?”

 He didn’t answer right away. He could lie, try to spin something about doing his part for his country, for the world, he could even tell him that his best friend, his brother, the man he loved was over there somewhere and this was the only way he could possibly get to him or at least die closer to him.

But he opted for the truth. “Yes.”

Dr. Connors stared at him for a moment, then nodded. “Thank you. If you’ll just follow me.”

Peter wouldn’t have guessed the army recruiting office took up this much of the building. The corridor Dr. Connors took him down seemed to go past endless rooms containing serious-looking people milling around, some in uniforms, some in suits. He didn’t see any women, and he wondered what this person must be like, this woman who was in charge of an international military project. If this didn’t work out, meeting her would be worth the trouble.

Dr. Connors led him into a poorly lit room with a bare desk and two chairs on either side, one of which he gestured for Peter to sit in. The doctor excused himself, leaving Peter to sit and wonder if he’d been bamboozled somehow, if this was an elaborate practical joke. He started to think he should have just taken his 4F and been done with it.

He jumped a little when the door knob turned, and into the room came a woman carrying a file, Dr. Connors behind her. She sat down across from Peter at the desk, set the file next to her, and looked him straight in the eye.

“I’m Agent Romanoff,” she began, her voice rough and direct. “Dr. Connors tells me you’d like to know more about the Super Soldier program.”

Peter was completely caught off guard by everything about Agent Romanoff, so he just nodded.

“Good,” she said, her face remaining sharp and expressionless. “The Nazis are doing things with science and magic that make us look like Neanderthals, and our job is to catch up and get ahead of them. Dr. Connors has come up with a way to inject human beings with animal DNA to enhance their strength and speed and give them other advantages as well, depending on the animal. The goal is to create enough genetically-enhanced super soldiers to end the war quickly and decisively.”

She paused, raising one dark eyebrow at Peter as if waiting for him to laugh or call her crazy. Peter just sat and stared at her for a moment. “Why animals?” he finally asked. “Why not just – shoot people up with strength juice or something?”

“I don’t fully understand it myself,” she admitted, looking only mildly surprised by his reaction. “Doc can explain all the science, but basically it’s easier to put something that already exists in a living thing’s DNA into another living thing rather than make something from scratch.”

Peter slowly nodded. That at least sounded reasonable, if anything about this scenario that sounded like something out of one of Wade’s _Weird Tales_ magazines could be considered reasonable.

“But humans have got a lot of advantages over animals,” he continued. “How would that really help against – magic Nazis?”

“Good question,” she said, sitting forward. “The animal characteristics get amplified by a human’s more complex physiology. Right, doc?”

She looked to Dr. Connors, who Peter had almost forgotten about as he was standing silent in the dim corner of the room. He nodded, though he looked uncomfortable.

“For instance,” she continued, looking back at Peter, “if you were to fight a spider, you’d win. When you try to fight bullies four times your size, you get some good punches in because they’re surprised as hell, but you ultimately lose because they’re simply bigger and stronger than you.”

She put her elbows on the desk and leaned toward him. “But if you had a spider’s speed and strength proportional to your size, well – you’d win every fight.”

Peter said nothing as she looked at him, perfectly patient, waiting for a response. These people knew everything about him. That had to have taken some effort. Why? Why would they pay attention to him?

“I don’t understand,” Peter said, finally, “why you want me.”

“You’ve been a person of interest for some time,” she said, laying a hand on his file. “You kept trying to enlist after most people would have been relieved to get a 4F. You’re very brave. You’re obviously pretty resilient, mentally and physically. And frankly, you seem like the kind of person who might want to have some enhancements.”

She opened his file and leafed through a few pages, waiting for Peter to digest what she’d said. He got the impression that she was reading him, not what was in the file but reading his face and body, like there was nothing he or anyone else could hide from her.

“Doctor Connors doesn’t think we should use you,” she said, abruptly, “because you’re angry. What do you think about that?”

Peter saw Connors shift in his peripheral vision. He shrugged. “I don’t know why I oughta care what he thinks. Or what you think, for that matter.”

A faint, almost imperceptible smile appeared on Agent Romanoff’s face, mostly in her eyes. “See, I think you’re perfect for this job,” she said, “because you’re a contrary little shit with a great big chip on your shoulder. Much like myself.”

 _That great big chip on your shoulder_ — Peter’s heart felt like it stopped as he heard Wade’s voices saying those exact words in his head, a memory that seemed like it was from another life.

“I’d like to do it,” he said.

Agent Romanoff looked at him for a moment, and he did his best to meet her sharp gaze. She stood and held out a hand. “Welcome to the SSR, Mr. Parker.”


	3. Chapter 3

There were a lot of questions that Peter should have asked before signing those papers.

“Will I look like – an animal?”

Luckily, Agent Romanoff was patient with him. “No. And by that I mean, you shouldn’t, but we don’t exactly know what will happen when we inject you with the serum. Hence the ‘experiment’ part.”

He also should have asked whether or not he would have to go to boot camp. Shortly after formally signing his life away to the SSR, he spent six dreadful weeks on a base in Jersey.

“You need to at least be familiar with military operations,” Agent Romanoff explained to him. She and Dr. Connors were on the base, usually standing with other uniformed and suited individuals, watching Peter and his fellow grunts suffer from a distance away. “You’re not technically in the military, but you will be in combat. If you survive.”

Agent Romanoff seemed to enjoy reminding him of how very risky the procedure would be. At first he thought she was trying to scare him, but then he realized that perpetual gallows humor was just part of her personality.

“What animal will I be?” he asked during one of her visits to the mess hall. She never ate with any of the other recruits, who were all also affiliated with SSR in some way. It didn’t do Peter any favors with his peers, who already didn’t like him, but he didn’t care to eat with them anyway. It wasn’t that different from grade school.

Agent Romanoff smiled at him over her coffee. He had never seen her eat anything. “There’s some controversy about that. Dr. Connors is very interested in reptiles, mostly for the healing ability.”

“And you?” Peter asked. He liked how she only ever gave as much as was necessary in conversation, making the person she was talking to have to work for her words. He was trying to copy her, but so far it wasn’t working for him.

She shrugged, looking down at her mug. “I’m partial to spiders, myself.”

*~*~*

He realized boot camp was actually an audition of sorts when he was invited to a small office with Agent Romanoff, Doctor Connors, and a couple of officers that he’d seen around but hadn’t directly interacted with. They were too important to spend time with regular troops, even ones that might become super soldiers. They were also not fond of the idea of Peter being their experiment subject.

“We’ve got plenty of big, powerful men over there already,” Agent Romanoff said after the officers had spent themselves complaining about Peter’s size and lack of athletic prowess. He wasn’t sure why he needed to be in the room at all. “We need a small, wiry fella with speed and agility and enough strength to lift a tank,” she continued. “They won’t see that coming.”

She let Dr. Connors talk after that, and Peter understood why. These men were more likely to listen to another man, even a soft-spoken scientist with one arm, than to a woman. He hated them for underestimating them both.

Either Agent Romanoff’s argument was persuasive or when it came down to it she really was in charge because the next night she visited him to say congratulations. She also told him he had to start calling her Nat since she might very well be responsible for his death in a few days.

“How old were you when you lost your folks?” she asked around the cigarette she was lighting.

“Don’t you know all that?” Peter asked, taking the cigarette she offered him. He had never smoked one before – though he knew Wade had indulged in them every now and then, he wouldn’t let Peter near the things. It made him cough, but Nat didn’t bat an eye.

“I could refer to your file,” she admitted, “but I’d rather talk about it like regular people. Unless you don’t want to.”

“Five,” he answered, looking at the ground. He didn’t mind talking about it. It was a dull ache. When he thought of it, he remembered the feeling of May holding him tight as Ben told him the news. It wasn’t an altogether awful memory.

“How old when your uncle was killed?”

Peter grimaced at the taste of smoke in his mouth. That one was not a dull ache. “Fourteen.”

“You didn’t find him, did you?”

He’d never heard her sound quite like that before, like her words just came outside, unplanned. “My aunt did. I found her.”

They smoked in silence a moment. Well, Peter mostly held his guttering cigarette. “And she’s it?” Nat asked. “All you’ve got?”

“Well –“ Jesus, he hadn’t talked out loud to anyone about Wade in six weeks. Was he going to now, with this person he barely knew? “There’s one – this guy I grew up with, a little older than me.”

“Where’s he?”

“He joined up. I haven’t heard from him in months.”

“Peter—“ He looked up to see that she was staring out at the darkening horizon, past the flag pole that Peter had run past every day for six weeks, lungs burning, pushed on only by his own frustration. “War is really not something I can prepare you for. It’s horrible.”

The way she said it left no doubt in Peter’s mind about whether she was speaking from experience. “Once you’re – changed, we’re putting you on a plane. You’ll go straight into a war zone on a mission. And you’ll be very powerful.”

He’d felt something growing in himself that he supposed was an intended result of military training. Much as he’d struggled, he had ready reactions now that he hadn’t had before, not just back alley fight instincts but organized, strategic instincts. He’d already been changed in ways he didn’t quite understand. The thought of going into a war zone made his blood run cold, but it also sounded – not exciting, not exactly, but – right. As if it was the next thing. As if he was just waiting for it. He could imagine himself, a different and capable version of himself, breaking the bodies of evil people and throwing them away, so that they couldn’t hurt anyone else. It would be like attacking a bully, but he would win, and he’d know the whole time that he’d win.

The procedure itself was simple. Dr. Connors went over it with Peter multiple times before the big day, the last time during the car ride from base to the lab, which happened to be in Queens.

“You have to be perfectly honest about what you experience,” Dr. Connors told him for the umpteenth time. “Don’t try to be brave or tough – if it hurts, say so right away. Do you remember the number chart?”

Peter nodded – he’d stared at the numbered pain scale Dr. Connors had given him instead of sleeping the night before. They would bring him into a lab, restrain him on a gurney, and he’d be given six injections at once. If he could be specific about his pain, tell them he was experiencing an “eight” rather than a “five,” then they might be able to save his life. Or he would die. Or he would live and have the proportional speed and strength of a spider.

“I got beat up in that alley,” Peter said, pointing out the window. Dr. Connors laughed, awkwardly. He thought the doctor had sort of warmed up to him since they’d met. He started to point out a fire-escape that a high-schooler had chased him up when he was nine, but then he remembered Wade saving him from that particular incident and stayed silent. He was going to think of Wade enough as soon as they got to the lab.

“Agent Romanoff says you wanted to try lizards first,” he said. “Because of the healing factor.”

Dr. Connors’ eyes went a bit flat. “That’s true. I can’t say it’s for entirely unselfish reasons, but I do think that would be an asset to a super soldier.”

“Do spiders have – healing factors?”

That made the doctor smile for some reason. “It’s very possible that you could experience accelerated or at least more – extensive healing.”

“Could you use that?” Peter asked. “For you arm?”

He was afraid he’d overstepped, but Dr. Connors nodded. “It’s possible. But I’m also continuing my work with reptiles – after today, who knows now many enhanced soldiers they’ll fund for us?”

Peter was imagining a whole army of humans with animal-like powers when the car stopped outside of an unassuming storefront. He realized instantly that they were only about a couple of blocks from his walk-up, from May. He wondered for the millionth time if he should have insisted on having her with him for the procedure.

Telling May he’d joined the army was very nearly as horrible as finding Wade in uniform in his room that day. Why hadn’t he thought about her before that moment, how she would feel to hear he’d enlisted after being rejected? She must have been so utterly relieved when he’d gotten his 4F, to know that this one person, her last person, wouldn’t be taken from her, that she wouldn’t have to worry about him dying somewhere far away.

He’d apologized over and over and told her he’d see her after boot camp, before he went overseas. If he died in this lab today, would she ever know what happened to him? Nat had promised that if he didn’t make it, through the procedure or through the war, that the SSR would take care of May. That and the thought of her not having to work herself to the bone to feed him, to keep a roof over both of their heads, helped him make the decision. And he understood why she couldn’t be present for a top secret experiment.

But as he walked through the store front (literally as it was a fake antique shop) and into a lab full of towering, stainless steel contraptions, he wished he could see her face.

“Goddamnit! Goddamn useless piece of junk!”

Peter followed the shouting to a catwalk halfway up the very tall room where a man wearing large goggles was kicking a gage.

“Watch your fucking language, Howard,” Nat’s voice came from behind Peter. Various goggle-and-lab-coat-wearing people in other parts of the room laughed at this – no suits around today, evidently. The atmosphere was easy, excited people about to do something they’d worked on together for a long time.

“Don’t mind him, he’s just the muscle,” Nat explained, gesturing at the man on the catwalk who was still kicking at machinery. “Puts all our hardware together. He’s the reason we can give you six huge shots at one time today.”

He was well aware that was going to happen, but as Peter looked at the contraption in the center of the room his skin crawled. He saw the gurney, more like a strange table with joints and hinges, saw the straps that would hold him, and saw how the metallic arms hanging over the table would swoop in to pierce his skin.

“Jacket and shirt off,” Dr. Connor said, giving his shoulder a brief squeeze as he walked past Peter to do his preparations. Peter made his arms work, stripping down to his undershirt and folding his clothes. He slipped off his combat boots, but they’d told him he could keep his pants on. At least he wouldn’t die in his underwear.

“Let’s get this done,” Nat said, making him jump as she appeared at his elbow and took his folded clothes, setting them on a counter. She marched him straight over to the table, gesturing for everyone else to get to their positions for the procedure. He already felt a kinship with her, but this gesture made his chest nearly burst with affection – she wasn’t going to make him wait.

Peter could move in the straps. A little. They were just there to hold him steady in case he had a – reaction, something unpredictable. He wasn’t laying flat either, which he was thankful for, but it felt awkward to be tilted slightly back, prone under the mechanical arms holding needles over him.

“I’d close my eyes and think of England,” said Howard the Hardware Man, who’d stopped kicking machinery to help get Peter arranged. He gave him a friendly pat on the chest and darted away, leaving Dr. Connors to give Peter an uneasy smile before backing away himself, leaving him totally alone under the lights and sharp objects.

Peter closed his eyes, but he didn’t think of England. He heard a whirring, metallic sound and knew the arms were bending towards him with their poison. He focused on conjuring Wade’s face, his blue eyes and their perpetual twinkle, his sweet smile. It was easy to do. He had imagined this face every night for over a year and a half, challenging himself to see every detail. He heard Wade’s laugh, and he felt his heart rate slow, felt the knots in his stomach come undone. He heard Wade say his name, felt Wade’s hand on his face, felt Wade’s mouth open to him, warm and soft –

The pain was excruciating. It was certainly an eight rather than a five. Ignoring Dr. Connor’s advice, Peter bit down on his lip to keep a scream inside, fisted his hands and strained against the straps holding him in place. He would get through this or it would kill him. He could do it. He kept his eyes closed tight and felt Wade’s arms around him, felt Wade sway as he held him, Wade’s breath on his ear as he murmured comforting words to him – _I’ve got you, baby boy…_

“Should he be glowing?”

When Peter’s eyes fluttered open, he was startled to see everyone who’d been in the lab gathered close to his body. He was no longer strapped down, and as he moved his arms he felt a strange sensation.

“Can you stand up, Peter?”

He could stand up. He could also crawl up a wall. When Nat had asked him to, he’d laughed a little, but then his hand had stuck to the perfectly smooth metal. He could also walk down the string that Howard attached between a girder and the grated floor.

“Not too much,” Dr. Connors cautioned the lab tech who was increasing the speed of the treadmill Peter ran on. Peter laughed out loud – he barely felt the change. His legs and arms were pumping effortlessly, muscles totally relaxed, breath moving cleanly in and out of his lungs – he felt free. He felt strong.

He was also, as Nat had pointed out, glowing.

“It’s just the injection sites,” Howard said, helpfully. “I’m sure it’ll wear off. I mean, it is radiation, after all – glowing’s sort of par for the course.”

Nat narrowed her eyes at him. “We’ll see. Let’s get him to the hotel – early bed time tonight, Parker.”

They were putting him up in town so that he could see May one more time tomorrow before they boarded the plane to go wherever they were going. Peter appreciated it. He also felt like he could jump out of his skin and the thought of lying down to try to sleep was laughable.

He had never in his life even dreamed of staying in a hotel, and part of him knew this one wasn’t fancy, but he was awestruck nonetheless. It just compounded his feeling that this was all a dream and that he’d soon wake up in his bed at home, weak and helpless again.

“Go to sleep,” Nat said, smirking at his attempts to flip backwards in the air on his hotel bed, “and tomorrow I’ll teach you how to do that without looking like an idiot.”

Perhaps if Nat had been assigned to watch him instead of Dr. Connors he would have stayed in his room all night. The moment Dr. Connors fell asleep on the other bed, Peter opened the big window and hopped out onto the fire escape. After a few deep, steadying breaths, he pulled himself up the brick side of the building and found that he did indeed stick to it. He laughed, scuttling around the window of their room for a while, enjoying. He’d like to see a bully chase him up a fire escape now.

As he was considering going back inside to try to sleep, Peter felt a cold chill, as if the hairs on the back of his neck were standing up. He turned around and looked out at the lit up city, and not knowing why, he scanned the waterfront. He saw nothing out of the ordinary, but – he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was happening out there, something important.

Peter climbed back through the window, careful not to wake poor Dr. Connors, and grabbed one of the cloth napkins from dinner (which Peter still couldn’t believe had been prepared and brought up to their room with just a phone call). He tied it around the lower part of his face, and though he immediately felt stupid, he also had enough respect for Nat that he didn’t want to completely blow the secrecy of their project by spider-ing all over the city with his face out.

Though he was able to get to the waterfront much faster than he would have been able to only hours before, Peter decided that if he was going to be a spider soldier, he should probably have webs. With his size and his new found agility, he’d be able to travel farther in much less time if he didn’t have to stay on the ground. He had to push those thoughts aside though as he neared the waterfront and could hear and see multiple police sirens.

There were three cop cars surrounding a small warehouse. How had he known to come here, he wondered? Could spiders sense excitement? Danger? He climbed up the wall of an adjacent building to get closer, nearly slipping once in his enthusiasm.

“—pick us off like goddamn turkeys,” he heard one cop say to another.

“Just one?”

“Just the one,” the cop said, “burglar, but he’s already shown he’s a crack shot.”

Peter did not for the life of him know why he swung down into the warehouse on the narrow telephone wire that happened to connect the two buildings. Later he thought it was fate, that he somehow knew who was in that warehouse. He crawled inside through a busted window, unseen by the cops, and quietly snuck along the high catwalk that lined the outer wall. He could see the burglar, crouched next to a window, panting and watching the police outside, clutching his gun. He looked panicked, desperate. Peter thought if he could get to him from above, surprise him, then maybe he could get the gun away from him. It felt no different from going after a 200-pound bully.

But as Peter crawled along the metal roof, looking upside down at his target’s face, he got a cold chill for the second time that night.

The memory was like watching a movie it was so vivid. He’d been woken up by the gunshot. The house went immediately quiet after that, and Peter had half thought he’d dreamed it. For some reason, he’d gone straight to his window and looked out, down to the street, where he saw a figure, a man, hurtle out their door. Before he ran off into the night, he turned and looked up, right at Peter. He would never forget that face. The next moment he had gone downstairs and found May, sitting on the floor in their hallway, holding a lifeless form, sobbing and telling Peter not to look.

The burglar turned and screamed when he realized there was something large dropping onto him from above. He tried to fire, but an incredibly strong blow knocked the gun from his hands. Peter felt like he was watching himself from outside of his body as he easily pinned the burglar to the ground, effortlessly landing punch after punch to his head. At first the burglar shouted threats, but they quickly turned into pleas. Then he stopped making sounds altogether, stopped struggling, just a bag for Peter to punch. He was killing him. He knew that. He’d been training for six weeks to kill other humans, and this one was a murderer.

It felt as if someone wrapped their arms around him from behind. Peter froze, still pinning the burglar to the ground with his knees. There was no one else in the warehouse, but he could feel a tall, sturdy body pressed against his back, a chin resting on his shoulder. He closed his eyes and reopened them. He looked down at the burglar’s face to see that it was bloodied and swollen beyond recognition. He could kill him with another blow. He had a right to, if anyone did.

 _They hurt people because they can,_ he heard Wade’s voice say in his memory. _Because they happen to be bigger or stronger._

Wade knew about bullies, even better than Peter. He didn’t remember too much about his parents, but he remembered that they loved him. All of Peter’s bullies came from outside, not from the people who were supposed to take care of him. The idea was so foreign that when he was six and Ben had explained to him that Wade’s daddy was mean to him, Peter hadn’t understood how that could be.

_If you were big and strong, you wouldn’t hurt anybody._

It wasn’t true. But Wade wanted it to be. Peter could give him that, even if he never knew about it.

Peter stood up, looked around and found some discarded rope. He bound the burglar, his arms and legs, kicked the gun away so that there was no possibility he could get it if he came to, and left the warehouse the same way he’d come in.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Featuring beautiful web-shooter art at the end of the chapter!!!

Africa was beautiful. At least the Northern part, the part where they were. Peter knew that Africa was a huge continent with many different nations, but that was a little hard to wrap his head around. Up until a few days ago, he thought he’d live his whole life without ever leaving Queens.

The morning they left New York, Peter decided not to tell Nat about his adventure the night before. He did, however, tell her that he’d decided not to use his spider enhancements to kill anyone. She had looked at him for a long moment, frowning.

“That might make what we’re about to do sort of complicated,” she said, finally.

Peter reminded her that he had no idea where they were about to take him or what they were about to do. She said she’d tell him about it on the plane.

Telling May goodbye felt like a dream. It was too much to think about how he didn’t know where he was going or what would happen to him, how she had no idea he was suddenly strong and fast and could apparently sense danger.

“You write to me,” she said, her voice steady. “Don’t you disappear.”

“No,” he promised, holding her tighter.

“And come home.”

“I will.”

She said more, but he didn’t like to think about that. It made his chest burn and his stomach ache and it was too much. He’d think about it another time.

As beautiful as North Africa was, the impossible stretch of desert and beautiful mountains that took his breath away, he was somewhat devastated that they weren’t in the Pacific.

“The Pacific theatre isn’t as exciting as it used to be,” Nat explained loudly. Howard Stark, their pilot, had designed the aircraft so that they could hear each other better than in any other plane, but they still had to raise their voices. “Europe is where the action is right now, but we’re going to Tunisia.”

Peter had assumed Wade would be in the Pacific because he’d joined up so early. He had no idea where he actually was, but he couldn’t help feeling a pang of grief – the likelihood that he’d find him was already so slim, and now it seemed impossible.

It had taken days and four long plane rides to get from New York to Tunisia. Peter quickly decided he did not love travel, but the desert – he liked the desert. He couldn’t imagine, though, as he looked at the scrubby and treeless terrain, how terrifying it would be to fight a battle here.

“I thought the Allies had North Africa,” he said to Nat on the plane.

“They do,” she said. “The main war’s not in Africa anymore, but we’re not part of the main war.”

The main war was dealing with Nazis and fascists. Their war, the secret war, was dealing with magic. Nat had mentioned this to him when he’d signed up for the program, but that was also when she’d told him she wanted to give him animal powers.

He believed her, though – he could crawl up walls and pick up a tank, so if Nat said there were evil magicians in the North African mountains, then there must be.

“One of our special ops squads was infiltrating their fortress and we lost communication,” she told him. “So now we get to try.”

“Are the magicians Nazis?”

“Sort of,” she explained. “The Red Skull was in charge of – well, basically the Nazi equivalent of the SSR. When the Allies took Medinin, he was ordered back to Berlin, but he didn’t go, just stayed holed up in the mountains trying to finish his work.”

“What’s he doing?” Peter asked.

“That’s what we’re going to find out,” she smiled, grimly. “He’s got another character with him that we’ve had our eye on for a while, but we don’t know how they’re involved. There’s a lot we don’t know.”

Peter was so overwhelmed by knowing so many things that the average American civilian wouldn’t believe that he was somewhat glad there wasn’t more.

When they landed at their camp in Tunisia, there were very few agents or soldiers to greet them, just a skeleton crew that had stayed behind when the task force had gone to infiltrate Red Skull’s fortress. It was a little eerie, and the mood was not optimistic.

“Try these,” Howard Stark said, approaching him five minutes after they’d landed and handing him a pair of what looked like big cuffs. “For your spider web.”

Peter looked up at him in awe. He’d told everyone who’d listen that he needed to be able to spin webs and had gotten some funny looks and some “we’ll work on it” in return. Evidently, Howard had not only agreed but had sketched out plans and somehow conveyed them to the small engineering facility he had here in the desert.

“They fit!” he said as if he’d already known they would. “Now, all you have to do is flick your wrists and the web will fly out, try it.”

Peter did, flicking his wrists and feeling like an idiot. The “web” turned out to be sturdy, agile wires that would wrap around whatever he aimed them at. Or rather, that was the idea.

“You just need practice,” Howard insisted after the fourth time the wire failed to catch around a tent pole.

“I don’t think it should be wire,” Peter said. “And I think it’d be easier to aim if I didn’t have to flail my arms all over to get it out.”

Howard looked like Peter had called his grandmother a low-rent hooker. Peter saw Nat press her lips together and knew she was struggling not to laugh out loud.

“Just what exactly do you have in mind?”Howard demanded, crossing his arms.

After ten minutes with him in the lab, Howard had decided that Peter was his new best pal.

“Why didn’t you tell me he’s a chemical engineer?” he asked, indignantly.

Nat shrugged. “I told you he had top marks in all his classes.”

“That is somewhat different,” Howard said, hands on his hips, “from being able to make synthetic long-chain polymer fluid with shit you find in a lab.”

“It’s a well-stocked lab,” Dr. Connors said, pulling at the concoction until it stretched out from its beaker by a full foot. “But this is wonderful, Peter.”

Peter just smiled and continued tinkering with the metal scraps he’d found in a box. He’d never really done anything with his love of science, just what his teachers would work on with him after school. Wade had always pressed him to enter a competition.

_You’re gonna go to college, Petey._

Peter could see him lounging on his bed, bouncing a ball off the wall, grinning at him.

“Oh yeah?” Peter had said, fifteen and trying so hard not to be in love with the man he was talking to. “With whose money?”

Wade shrugged. “I’ll knock off some rich guy’s kid. You can take his place.”

That night, he let himself think about Wade. He had tried, since boot camp, to turn off his mind at night, to not let his thoughts turn that way. His tent on the desert base was smaller, private. He opened his small bag where he’d packed every single one of Wade’s letters and read his favorites. They were all even more precious to him now that he hadn’t received one in months. If Wade sent May a letter at home, how long would it take for Peter to know about it? She could be reading a new letter from Wade right now, about to write Peter tell him the good news.

He let himself think of what May had said to him, that day when he left.

“He may not be alive, baby.”

His insides turned to ice. He saw in her eyes that she knew what her words were doing to him, but she pressed on. “Whether he is or isn’t, you’ll be okay,” she said, resting her hands lightly on his shoulders. “It doesn’t feel like it, but – you can lose your first love and still be okay.”

She knew. She’d probably known all along, probably before Peter did. He wanted to stay and tell her a million things and ask her even more, but he left and got on a plane, and now he was in the desert.

*~*~*

The new mechanism fit into Howard’s gauntlets perfectly. All Peter had to do was tap the palms of his hands and supple, sticky strands shot directly where he wanted. He wondered if spiders had good hand-eye coordinator or if all those years dodging rocks in the school yard had just paid off.

After only one hard day of training, Natasha declared that they were ready.

“No thanks,” Peter said to the rifle she held out to him.

“Standard issue,” Nat said, her expression hard. “You need to be able to protect yourself and others.”

She hadn’t brought up his decision not to kill since they’d left the states, but he’d figured it was coming. And here it was.

“You don’t have a rifle,” he said, gesturing at the two sleek handguns she wore at her waist.

“I don’t need one,” she countered, still holding out the rifle.

“How’m I supposed to go swinging all over the place with this thing on my back?” he asked. “I’m here to be little and fast, right?”

“And strong,” she said, finally dropping the rifle to her side. “Don’t forget that part, Peter.”

“I won’t,” he assured her, picking up a stray Jeep tire and tossing it across the yard towards Howard, making him yelp. Nat didn’t smile, but Peter could tell she wanted to.

His and Nat’s uniforms were similar in that they fit close, were made out of some kind of strong material that was lighter than leather, and were dark in color. The biggest difference was the mask – Nat didn’t wear one, not even a helmet, as she said it messed with her “antennae.” Peter found that his full-faced mask greatly helped him focus his new, heightened senses and was surprisingly comfortable.

Peter was also happy to see that he and Nat both wore emblems on their uniforms, though not the same one. His was a simple design on his chest and back that looked like a spider. Nat’s emblem was only on her back and was not a full spider but a very recognizable hour-glass design.

“Isn’t that what’s on black widows?” he asked.

Nat smiled, pleased. “Told you I’m partial to spiders.”

The fortress was about thirty miles from the SSR base. Nat and Peter rode in one Jeep, Howard and his “armor” in the other. Three people were less likely to get noticed and easier to extract than a whole squad, but Peter couldn’t help wishing there were more of them speeding across the desert. He knew from the maps Nat had gone over and over with him that they wouldn’t see the fortress before they were on top of it, but he still scanned the horizon for an evil-looking castle, heart hammering in his chest.

“This is gonna be fun,” Nat murmured to him as they approached the mountains where Peter knew they’d be leaving the Jeeps.

Peter looked at her through his mask. Nat usually came off as intimidating, but the deadly focus in her eyes now was downright scary. “Sure it is,” he said, swallowing.

Once they left the Jeeps, Peter could see that the fortress was just below them. He wasn’t sure who would be stupid enough to put an evil magician fortress where it had cliffs overhanging it, but the Nazis hadn’t asked him his opinion. Maybe they were so powerful they didn’t need to think about such things.

“Wait for Howard,” Nat said through the tiny earpiece sewn into his mask. Peter crouched in the shallow crevice that was his ready position, but he didn’t have to wait long.

He hadn’t seen Howard’s “armor,” as he called it, in action before, but holy cow was it ever distracting. He watched as the giant metal suit careened down toward the fortress from the cliff side, firing off huge rounds and taking big chunks out of the side of the building. Peter thought that he’d crash right into a turret, but at the last moment he saw four bright flames and realized there were jets installed in the suit that let Howard control his descent. He couldn’t wait to get a look at the thing when they got back to base.

But first, they had to get back to base. Peter took off – his role was simple and clear, which he was grateful for, because this fortress looked every bit the evil castle he’d imagined. He swung quickly down from his perch, shooting his webbing in front of him and hoping that he’d brought enough extra fluid should he run out. The window on the east side of the lower turret was there, just as Nat had told him it would be, and he punched through it easily and scurried inside. He could hear the Nazi magicians firing back at Howard now – he needed to hurry.

Peter crawled up the stone wall and moved along the ceiling – this had given him an advantage once before, and he figured it was a good technique. At this point, Nat had only been able to speculate about what he’d run into, and after traversing a narrow corridor he found himself in a large, open room.

The room was filled with cages, and inside of the cages were people.

Peter stopped where he was to process this. The Nazi magicians had prisoners, and by the looks of them, they were soldiers. He was pretty sure he’d found the squad the SSR had sent in and lost contact with. They looked somewhat worse for wear, but he could tell by the way they moved and stared at the two guards in the room that they were restless and mad and would probably be great help in a fight.

Using his web, Peter dropped down from the ceiling just behind one of the guards, and for the first time he felt so much like a giant spider that he nearly laughed out loud. He did not disarm the guard fast enough to keep him from crying out, and he had to dodge bullets from the other guard before he was able to fire off webbing. He probably should have just webbed them both up from his place on the ceiling, he realized – he’d remember that for later.

“You SSR?” asked one of the prisoners as he broke the first cage’s lock with his elbow.

“Yeah,” he said, panting, “Agent Romanoff and Howard Stark are outside drawing their fire, I’m supposed to do recon.”

“We’ve done plenty of recon, bub,” said the man, who was tall and grim with a thick beard that made Peter want to listen to him. “Help us get out of here.”

“There’s one more of us,” said a man with a goatee in the next cage that Peter broke open. “Down this hall and two more halls to the right, in a lab.”

He said it as if Peter was supposed to go and collect their thirteenth member himself, and as the twelve freed prisoners started moving from the room in a strategic formation, Peter guessed that was the case. “You’re welcome,” he muttered as he leapt back onto the ceiling and started down the next hall.

Goatee-man’s directions had been accurate – Peter followed three more winding corridors and found himself on the ceiling of a small laboratory. He could see a steel table in the center of the room and a still body lying on it. After stretching out his new, sharpened senses to make sure there were no Nazi magicians close by, he dropped down next to body. And then his heart stopped.

For a moment, he thought he was hallucinating. He could hear constant gun fire now, both in and outside of the fortress. The fear and the stress had gotten to him, and he was seeing the face he most wanted to see in the whole world in order to cope.

“Wade?”

He tapped at the beautiful face, lightly, then a bit harder when the eyelids started to flutter. “That’s me,” said the dry, lovely voice. “What took you assholes so long?”

Before Peter could formulate a response to that, his skin prickled. He looked up and shot a stream of webbing at the door opposite them just as a lab-coat-wearing Nazi appeared, knocking him over.

“Holy shit,” Wade said, struggling to sit up. “Where’d they dig you up?”

“I’m new,” Peter said, hoping Wade wouldn’t recognize his voice through the mask. If he wasn’t a hallucination, this was not the time or place for the reunion he wanted to have. “Can you walk?”

Wade grinned at him as Peter helped him off the table to stand on wobbly legs. “Probably.”

“Here,” Peter said as he slung one of Wade’s big arms around his shoulder and tried not to break down sobbing at the sweet familiarity of its weight. “Don’t worry, I’ll get you out.”

“Who’s worried?” Wade quipped as they limped out of the lab. “I’m sticking with you, Webs.”

He didn’t know how they made it out of the fortress. There was crossfire everywhere as the squad Peter had freed tore their way through their captors to get outside, and once they made it out there was a line of heavy machine guns on the ground firing at Howard, who was holding out but looking battered as he darted in and out of the cliffs.

“Hold position!”

Peter turned to see Nat on the other side of the big doorway at the front of the fortress. Most of the squad had found their way to her, and she was directing them to fan out to try to break through the line of enemies.

“I’ll be back,” Peter told Wade, resting him against the stone wall. Wade looked at him like he was nuts, and he was again struck with an urge to either laugh or cry at how many times he’d seen that look throughout his life.

He tore his eyes from Wade’s face and swung up, using the fortress’s overhang to get himself to one of the two tanks that were firing at Howard. He flung himself and landed on the far side of the yard. Ignoring the nausea he felt at having hurtled through the air so far and fast, he put both hands under the tank’s tread and pushed for all he was worth. The huge thing gave way, and he kept pushing until he was fully underneath it.

Peter would have given anything for a picture of Nat’s face as she watched a goddamn tank fly through the air, landing and skidding its way across the yard, taking out the line of machine guns and sending Nazi magicians flying. The squad and Nat started racing out of the fortress towards the Nazi’s Jeeps, and Peter saw the bearded man from earlier helping Wade across the yard. As he made to follow them, he looked back at the fortress and saw, on a high balcony, a figure, tall and wearing a long black coat. It was a person, but instead of a face there was what looked like a bare skull. It was deep red.

“You wasted a perfectly good tank!” Nat yelled at him over the pursuing gunfire as she barreled the Jeep over rocks. Peter could see Wade safe behind them in another Jeep, and he finally let himself laugh. Nat joined him.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's where we earn the Explicit rating...

The journey back to their base took the rest of the night and well into the next day. They couldn’t head straight there but had to stop a few times, hole up and make sure they weren’t being followed. Peter wanted badly to hop out of their Jeep and go visit the Jeep where his favorite person in the world sat, but Nat told him to stay put – they couldn’t risk it.

“It’s really him?” she asked as they sat, hiding under their canvas roof.

“I think so,” Peter said, “unless I’m already shell- shocked.”

Nat smiled and clapped him on the back. “Well, what are the odds?”

Once the sun came up, Nat seemed to become less concerned and they covered a great deal of ground without stopping. Peter would occasionally look back to the other Jeep to see that his hallucination of Wade had not disappeared. In his excitement at finding him and the frightening ordeal of escaping a Nazi fortress, he hadn’t fully processed where he’d found Wade and what it had meant. What had the magician, the one they called Red Skull for obvious reasons, been doing to him in that lab?

Nat seemed particularly glad to have the goatee-sporting man riding with them. Peter could sense an ease from her that he hadn’t felt since they’d met, as if she finally felt like she didn’t have to carry everything by herself.

“Were you honestly not planning to rescue us?” asked Dr. Stephen Strange (the goatee-man) from the back seat of the Jeep.

Nat shrugged as she expertly guided the huge tires over the rocky terrain. “I sent somebody in, figured he’d rescue you if you were in there, and oh look, I was right.”

The Nazis had magicians, but as it turned out, so did the SSR.

“The correct term is sorcerer,” Dr. Strange told Peter, archly.

He chose to mostly listen as Dr. Strange the Sorcerer and Nat filled each other in on what they had done and learned since they’d last communicated. The squad had infiltrated the fortress as planned, but somehow Red Skull had been ready for them. Nat wondered if they had a mole, but Dr. Strange thought it had something to do with the other character working with Red Skull, the one they didn’t know much about. Nat told Dr. Strange all about Peter and his spider enhancements, and Dr. Strange thanked him for his bravery in volunteering for the project. Peter didn’t quite forgive him for the sorcerer crack, but he considered warming up to him later.

When they finally reached their camp, Peter was relieved to see Nat, Dr. Strange, and Howard immediately converge on Dr. Connors. The four of them were deeply absorbed in their conversation, leaving Peter free to look around among the other Jeeps.

“Hey there,” said a voice that sent a thrill up Peter’s spine. He turned to see Wade approaching him, smiling. “My hero. I didn’t get a chance to thank you for getting me away from ol’ Doctor Caligari.”

Peter grabbed Wade by the wrist and pulled him into the nearest, thankfully empty, tent. He turned to him, heart up in his throat.

“Hang on, Webs,” Wade said, wry smile still on his handsome face. Wade was never uncomfortable, just entertained. Peter had almost forgotten. “I’m grateful and all, but I’ve kind of got a beau back home--”

In one swift motion, Peter pulled the mask up and off of his head. Wade seemed to freeze. Peter couldn’t read his face. He felt tears on his own cheeks, and goddamnit, of course he would ruin this moment, but it was _Wade_ , in front of him, close to him.

“Peter?”

Peter nodded, and then he couldn’t stop the sob that rose up in his chest, but it was okay because suddenly Wade’s hands were cupping his face and Wade’s lips were kissing his forehead. Peter reached up and held him back, looking at his beautiful face, his gorgeous blue eyes that Peter had dreamed about every second since he’d left. He pulled him into a kiss, a real kiss, and they stayed there for a long time, breathing into each other.

“You’re so strong,” Wade said when they broke apart, foreheads touching. Peter laughed, wrapping his arms around Wade’s waist. He’d forgotten how tall he was, how broad. To his dismay, Peter felt himself hiccup with sobs again. He couldn’t help it.

“I’ve got you,” Wade murmured, tucking Peter’s head under his chin and swaying them slightly. Peter closed his eyes. “I’ve got you, baby. I can’t believe it.”

They were quiet for a beautiful moment that seemed to stretch forever, just remembering what it felt like to hold each other, to be held. Peter felt safe, warm, loved – he hadn’t realized how much he’d missed it.

“A beau back home, huh?” Peter teased when he could make his voice work again.

Wade’s arms tightened around him. “Eh, that’s just what I’ve been saying to keep the broads offa me.”

Peter slapped him lightly on the back, then tilted his face up, resting his chin on Wade’s chest. “I have my own tent.”

Wade looked down at him, wide-eyed. “What’d you get up to while I was gone?” he teased. “Inviting strange men back to your private tent, the very idea! I oughta teach you a lesson.”

“You can do anything you feel like doing to me.”

Wade stared at him, and Peter could hear him breathing. Wade had never quite looked at him that way before, like he was – hungry. Peter liked it very much.

“Peter?”

They both shook themselves at the sound of Nat’s voice, but she still caught them standing close when she pushed back the tent flap. “Jesus, there you are,” she said, taking in the scene. “Sorry to, uh – interrupt the reunion.”

“Nat, this is Wade,” Peter told her, clearing his throat.

Wade saluted and introduced himself to her with proper military etiquette, which made Peter need to hold his hands in front of himself. His suit gave him absolutely no cover, and Wade with the uniform and the rifle on his back and the saluting was just downright erotic.

All of Wade’s squad needed debriefing, medical exams, baths, and food.

“We’re the Dirty Thirteen!” announced one of Wade’s squad members whom the others had referred to as Weasel. “We don’t waste water on hygiene, it’s our calling-card!”

“I will be wasting some water on hygiene today,” Wade said, winking at Peter as he pushed Weasel into the group shower tent. Peter cursed himself for blushing.

All of the Dirty Thirteen, as Wade’s squad was called, seemed to know who Peter was. They hadn’t taken much note of him when he rescued them from Nazi wizards, but once they found out that he was “Wade’s Peter,” they started treating him like a long-lost little brother, clapping him hard on the back and head-butting him affectionately. It was overwhelming, but – sweet.

Nat seemed to also have a rapport with these rough, cheerful soldiers, particularly with Logan, the bearded man who had helped Wade at the fortress. Logan and Nat entertained the rest of the base during their meal by downing shot after shot of whisky. No one was surprised when Nat won the competition handily.

Wade seemed completely at home with his squad. Peter listened and laughed with everyone else as Wade and his friend Sam gave a lively account of their more recent exploits. It sounded as if they’d been a significant if unseen help to the Allied armies against the German Afrika Corps in the last months of the campaign, raiding camps at night and sabotaging weapons and vehicles.

Peter gathered that most of them had enlisted and been put on the ground as regular grunts but had been recruited by the SSR when they’d distinguished themselves in battle. Wade, according to Sam, had rescued an entire Japanese village as well as their platoon. Peter tried not to look too obviously smitten with his big, brave man as they all ate, drank, and caroused until the sun started to dip below the mountains. The Dirty Thirteen, exhausted for all of their loud celebrating, started clearing away their plates and heading towards their tents. Peter tried to remember everyone’s names as they told him good night, complete with more affectionate back-clapping and head-butting.

“I hear you have your own tent.”

Peter’s heart leapt in his chest. He turned around to see Wade’s gorgeous blue eyes sparkling with mirth, just like always.

“You hear right,” Peter smirked, trying to look coy. “Would you like a tour, soldier?”

Wade laughed, and the sound was so beautiful that Peter could have cried. “Yes, please.”

He’d nearly been shot he didn’t know how many times in the last twenty-four hours, but as he led Wade by the hand to his tent he couldn’t help feeling that this place was blessed, holy. He’d seen only miracles since he came here.

For some reason he couldn’t stop thinking of _Romeo and Juliet_ , which they’d had to read in 10th grade. The other boys had hated it and Peter had adored it. He had read it to Wade, who had dropped out of school in 9th grade, and Wade had adored it as well. As he pulled Wade behind him into the white canvas tent, Peter felt like Juliet waiting in her room, talking to the gentle night and asking it to bring her Romeo to her. And here he was.

“You okay?”

He looked into Wade’s sweet eyes, full of concern for him. Peter smiled, not able to speak quite yet, and Wade smiled back, cupping his face with one hand.

“We don’t have to do anything tonight, Petey,” he said, rubbing Peter’s cheekbone with his thumb. “We have time.”

A shadow passed over his face then, maybe because Wade realized that they were both in the field now, both in danger every second. Peter felt a pang of hesitation himself – there were a million questions he needed to ask Wade, so many things he wanted to say, so much anger and hurt and confusion screaming to get out of him.

But if his brief time in the military had taught him anything it was that you had to seize opportunity when it appeared.

Wade gasped as Peter launched himself at him, capturing his mouth in a clumsy kiss, his hands running all over his torso and back, trying to touch him everywhere at once. It wasn’t enough. Peter rested his hands on Wade’s waist, forcing himself to slow down and enjoy the kiss, enjoy the feeling of Wade’s body tapering to his hips, oh holy mother his hips –

“Peter!”

He looked up at Wade from where he’d dropped to his knees in front of him, fingers pausing on his belt buckle. Wade’s mouth was hanging open, his eyes wide, face flushed, but he wasn’t stopping him. Peter kept looking him in the eye as he undid his belt (and oh, wide leather – he could think of a few things he’d like Wade to do with that belt). Even if Wade was shocked at his forwardness, he was certainly enjoying himself – his cock nearly sprang out of his underpants when Peter pulled open the front of his fatigues.

They had taken baths together, as little kids and more recently. Peter remembered one time that they’d been showering in the men’s locker room at the gym when he’d caught himself staring at Wade’s dick. He had been thirteen, Wade sixteen. He knew he had to have seen Wade’s – person before, but that time felt different. Wade seemed to know it, too, but he’d handled it beautifully as always, not making a big deal.

“You’ll look like this in a couple of years,” he’d said, grinning, “if you’re lucky.”

Peter didn’t know how he compared to Wade in that department now, but he did know one thing for sure – he wanted Wade’s big cock in his mouth. He palmed it, coaxing it out of the soft cotton of Wade’s briefs, clean and fresh after his recent shower. Wade’s hands were on his shoulders, and Peter glanced up, but Wade was still just watching him, his pretty lips parted.

He licked the palm and fingers of his right hand to make things more comfortable, too nervous and eager to try to be sexy about it, but he still heard Wade suck in a breath as he wrapped his other hand around the base of Wade’s cock. Holding Wade’s hip with his left hand to steady himself, Peter leaned forward and tentatively licked at the swollen head. Wade swore under this breath.

Peter covered his teeth with his lips and took in as much of Wade’s length as he could, hollowing out his cheeks as he bobbed up and down a few times. He’d done this before and not enjoyed it so much, but Wade’s skin in his mouth, on his tongue – it was wonderful, and he felt delicious heat curling in his own stomach. But then Wade’s hands were holding him back. He looked up – had he done something wrong?

“You don’t have to do this, sweetheart.”

Peter could have slapped him. “Would you stop second-guessing me,” he snarled, “and let me suck your cock?”

“I thought you’d just want to kiss and what not,” Wade said, looking sheepish (though, Peter noticed, his erection didn’t flag at all), “I don’t want to take advantage of you.”

Jesus Christ, why did his age and size have to foul up everything in his whole life? “I am not a baby,” Peter reminded. “I’m old enough to fight and die in a war, and I want this. Now hush.”

Wade pressed his lips together, staring at Peter like he’d never seen him before. Peter gently rolled Wade’s balls in his palm, and it worked like a charm – the big man’s eyes fell closed, mouth open in a gasp. Peter wasted no time getting his lips back around that cock, this time taking it in so far that he gagged. He recovered himself and opened his throat like he’d practiced, taking Wade deep inside.

Fingers gripped at his shoulders as he began to move, and after a few long, deep strokes, he quickened his pace, focusing on the sensitive head. A little huff of breath was all the warning he had before Wade came, filling his mouth, and he struggled to drink all of it down.

“Have – have you done that before?”

Peter shrugged, licking his lips to get what had spilled out. “A little. To practice. Wanted this to be good when you came home.”

Wade’s eyes went glassy as he looked down at Peter, cupping his face. Peter covered Wade’s hand with his, holding it to his skin, and then Wade was pulling him to his feet and into a deep kiss. Peter’s head spun as Wade’s tongue delved into his mouth and he realized Wade was chasing his own taste.

Wade broke the kiss and swept Peter up into his arms, bridal-style, carrying him over to the small cot that was his bed. He brushed Peter’s hair back off of his face, his gorgeous blue eyes so sweet as he looked at him, like he was all Wade wanted in the world. Peter felt his own eyes fill, but he was quickly distracted by Wade’s hand undoing his pants. He lifted up so that they could be worked down his hips.

Wade had a bit more practice at sucking cock than Peter, evidently. He wanted to pay attention, to pick up strategies for the next time Wade allowed him to do this for him, but he was quickly reduced to a moaning, panting mess by Wade’s lips and tongue. He came embarrassingly quickly, but Wade didn’t seem to mind, licking him all clean and then laying down next to him. Peter could taste himself in Wade’s mouth and instantly understood the appeal. Then they just lay next to each other for a long while, silent except for their breathing and the soft sounds of occasional kisses.

“I could have killed the bastard who shot Ben.”

Wade propped up on his elbow to look down at him. “Oh, yeah?”

The feeling of confessing to Wade, of being able to tell him anything and know he’d understand, nearly undid Peter right then and there. It had been so long, but it also felt like no time had passed, that they’d picked up right where they left off, just like Peter had hoped. He told Wade the whole story, leaving out no details, everything including how he’d gotten all of his new abilities.

“And I won’t kill anyone,” he said, finishing. “Not if I can help it. I don’t think any of those guys got hit with the tank last night, just their guns.”

Wade was looking at him very intently, zero mirth on his face. “I understand,” he said, placing a hand on Peter’s chest, “but if it comes down to you or the person trying to kill you, you’d better choose you. Got me?”

“It’s your fault,” Peter said. “You said if I was big and strong that I wouldn’t hurt anybody.”

“Since when do you listen to me?” Wade smiled, leaning down to kiss him again.

 “What did they do to you in that lab?” Peter found himself asking when they broke apart. “Did they hurt you?”

Wade’s face darkened, but he shook his head. “Nothing. Shot me up with some stuff, me and Logan. I thought it was truth serum or something, but nothing happened, I’d just pass out for a while and wake back up and they’d put me in the cage again.”

“Why’d you leave me?” Peter continued, questions pouring out of him now that he’d started. “Why’d you join up? Why’d you stop writing to us?”

“I told you,” Wade said, quietly. “I’m no good, Pete. I ruin shit, it’s what I do.”

“My life was awful without you.”

Wade swallowed, his eyes bright with unshed tears, and he leaned in and kissed Peter’s jaw, then his lips. Peter kissed back, hungrily.

“I wanted you to be happy,” Wade said, pressing his forehead into Peter’s temple. “I didn’t want you to join the goddamn army and turn into a spider, though that’s pretty neat, I gotta admit.”

“You can’t be surprised,” Peter quipped, turning to kiss him again. “Since when do I listen to you?”

“Never,” Wade laughed, but there was a gleam in his eyes. “Not ever. I oughta beat your little ass.”

“You oughta stop saying shit like that and just do it,” Peter said, biting Wade’s ear for good measure.

In the blink of an eye, Wade had him flipped onto his front and pinned with an arm behind his back. Peter only had time to gasp before Wade’s big hand came down on his naked ass with four stinging slaps.

“Like that?”

Peter moaned into the cot. This was too much, too perfect. He had to be dead, or this hallucination was a very long one.

“You must like it,” Wade purred, close to his ear. “I saw you throw a tank. You could throw me across the room like a goddamn kitten if you wanted to.”

“Please,” Peter whimpered, “please more, just like that—“

Wade immediately laid into him again, hard and firm and not too fast but one right after the other. Peter felt like his whole body, his whole mind was lit up like a Christmas tree. He’d wanted this for so long, pinned and powerless under Wade’s hand, dreamed of it as he touched himself, ashamed and red.

The glorious blows stopped, and Peter whined, his skin hot and tender and needing so much more. Wade’s hand covered his ass, rubbing gently. “Jesus you’re pretty, honey.”

Peter turned his face into the mattress to hide, suddenly shy. Wade laughed softly, applying a few more gentle slaps to his ass. “So cute with your ass all red, blushing for me. What else do you want me to do to this ass, baby?”

He looked over his shoulder to meet Wade’s eyes. Was he serious? Because there was a list. Wade seemed to understand him, gently kneading his ass with one hand as he held his thumb up to Peter’s mouth. Peter obediently opened and sucked the digit in, running his tongue all over the salty, calloused skin. Wade closed his eyes and sighed. He pulled his hand away and Peter let it go with an obscene “pop” sound. He watched as Wade moved his spit-slick thumb to his ass, just pressing it to his hole. Peter’s breath seized up in his chest.

“Anybody else touched you here, sweetheart?”

Peter closed his eyes, shook his head. “Just me,” he said, voice breaking embarrassingly. “Waiting for you.”

This time, Wade outright moaned, and the sound made Peter smile in spite of how overwhelmed he was. The pad of Wade’s thumb circled his asshole, pressing gently against the tight muscle, and Peter felt it pulse under his touch.

Then Wade was leaning over him, holding his ass cheeks apart with one hand while the other pressed into his low back. Peter felt Wade’s lips on the spanked skin of his ass, then Wade’s tongue, licking a stripe from his cheek down the increasingly sensitive flesh to his hole.

He cried out, clutching at the sides of the cot, and he could feel Wade smile. The tongue laved against him, and he felt himself clench involuntarily, trying to get away from and get more of the sensation at the same time. Wade held him fast, the strong muscle pushing more directly against his pucker, making it slick. Peter pressed his face into the cot and panted helplessly as he felt his muscles start to give, Wade’s tongue going inside of him, just a little, then more. Peter thrashed against the too-intense pleasure of it, the foreignness of it. He struggled to press up on his hands and knees, arching his back to try to get more, deeper.

The tongue was suddenly gone. “We’ll need something more than spit to keep going with this.”

Once his head stopped spinning, Peter reached under his thin blanket and felt around a moment before pulling out the small tube of lubricant that he kept stashed there.

“For those long, lonely nights in the army,” he explained.

Wade laughed out loud and rewarded him with another affectionate slap on his ass, and Peter laughed as well, joy welling up inside of him. No more long, lonely nights – not for either of them.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beautiful artwork from Bexorz at the end of this chapter!!

_Dear May,_

_They say I’m not allowed to tell you where I am, but it is beautiful. It’s a good thing too because the mail room is pretty boring. The food doesn’t cast a shadow on our cooking, but nobody goes hungry. I guess I’m very lucky to have ended up where I did._

_You won’t believe it, I hardly believe it myself, but I found Wade. He was captured, but he’s okay now. His platoon just happens to be stationed the same place I got sent. It’s a miracle. He wanted me to say he loves you and he promises to write soon._

_I hope you’re doing okay and not working too hard. It seems like things are going well in general over here and that maybe this whole thing will be over soon. I miss you and I think about you all the time, but I’m okay, don’t worry. Wade and I are taking care of each other. I’ll write again soon._

_All my love,_

_\- Peter_

*~*~*

Life in the SSR was strangely wonderful.

Peter’s days typically consisted of waking up next to Wade, either at their camp in the desert or in whatever location they’d ended up in, doing something incredibly dangerous, making enthusiastic love, and falling asleep together to wake up and do it all again the next day.

They tracked Red Skull and his operatives across the desert, almost to El Alamein.  Peter and Wade, Nat and Howard, and the Dirty Thirteen drove or sometimes flew from village to village across the beautiful terrain, running into pockets of Red Skull’s organization -- HYDRA, it was called -- and neutralizing them. Peter still refused to kill, and since they needed information, Nat didn’t make a fuss about how many prisoners he took.

More often than not, the soldiers the Nazi magician left behind took their own lives rather than get captured. Peter found that was less disturbing to him than the collateral damage they often caused. As long as he lived, he would never forget finding the burned remains of a HYDRA base, blown up from inside, a Libyan family’s bodies twisted in the wreckage.

“That’s war, kiddo,” Nat had said to him, her voice unusually soft. “Now you see why I don’t mind killing these bastards.”

Peter did see. The next place they came to, they found another rat’s nest of HYDRA operatives, and Peter pushed over an entire wall on top of them. They were horribly injured but survived. He had not meant for them to.

Wade took very good care of him that night.

“Oh, honey,” he murmured in Peter’s ear as he slowly pushed into him, “you feel so good, wish you knew—“

Peter whimpered but rocked his hips onto Wade’s cock, impaling himself even more. The sweet, intense pressure of having Wade inside of him was still new, still burned and made Peter feel taken, like he belonged to Wade, like he should.

Wade waited until they were both sated and curled together under their cool, soft sheet before bringing up what had happened. “It’s okay that you wanted to kill those fuckers. They’re bad people. Murderers.”

Peter sighed into Wade’s neck. “But then how am I not a murderer, when I’m so much stronger than they are? How is that fair?”

“War’s not supposed to be fair,” Wade said, an edge in his voice. “And you’d be keeping them from hurting the people they want to hurt. How much better would my life have been if somebody had off-ed my old man when I was a kid?”

Old anger burned in Peter’s chest. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t thought about that before, especially when they were little kids and Wade would turn up with strange bruises, crying and telling Peter he couldn’t talk about it. He kissed the adult Wade’s jaw and wrapped his arm more snugly around his waist.

“But I didn’t do it out of some sense of justice,” Peter murmured. “I did it because I was angry.”

“How could you not be angry?” Wade asked, tilting Peter’s chin up with one finger to look him in the eye. “You didn’t have a problem getting angry at mean assholes back when it could’ve gotten you killed, did you?”

Peter didn’t want to fight, but he knew Wade wouldn’t let it go. So he distracted him by bending him over and filling him up with his cock – that was also still new, and much more intimidating for Peter than the other way around, but Wade’s enthusiastic exclamations helped him get over his nerves. He fucked him hard and fast, just like Wade liked it, and it did stop him talking even if it didn’t make him any less loud.

*~*~*

The thing about being in the SSR, or at least their cell of the SSR, was that they didn’t have to pretend not to be head over heels for each other. Peter couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be this much in love, “young love” as Wong had called it, and be in Queens or in the regular military. They all risked their lives every day, and what they got up to in their tents with each other in their down time was something to get teased about at breakfast, nothing more.

Nat seemed to take her pleasure where she pleased – Peter had seen Howard Stark, Sam Wilson, and at least one of the lady nurses they had stationed on base leave her tent looking dazed and happy. He and Wade weren’t even the only pair on base – Dr. Strange and Wong seemed like they’d been married for years, perpetually cranky and affectionate with each other. It was amazingly comforting, all of these remarkable, odd people in one place, fighting evil and living every moment like it might be their last.

Sometimes, Wade and Peter got sent on missions by themselves. Nat said it was because they worked well together, and much as Peter had ulterior motives, he had to admit that they made a great team.

Their first time out by themselves was a job near Tripoli, helping the Allied troops stationed there to clean out a rebel cell that had been radicalized by HYDRA. They’d gotten the job done, but they couldn’t help noticing that the Allied officers were living in a goddamn mansion while the actual people whose home this place was lived in poverty and desperation. These people hadn’t asked for Europeans and Americans to fight a war in their desert, yet they were feeling the worst effects.

“This just won’t do,” Wade muttered as he helped a woman remove the shoes and pants of a dead rebel. Wade’s uniform also had a mask, red leather with black over the eyes, which made it easy for his fellow SSR agents to spot him but made the civilians understandably nervous.

“What can we do about it?” Peter asked, giving a group of kids his last K-rations.

Peter didn’t need to be able to see Wade’s mouth to know he had on a devilish smile.

When the Allied officers woke up the next day, they were shocked to find that a great deal of their food and clothing and anything expensive that they had lying around was gone and that the villagers seemed strangely smug. They looked everywhere for those two SSR smart-asses, but Peter and Wade were long gone.

When Nat approached them in the mess tent later that week, they were prepared to be yelled at for their Robin Hood exploits. Instead, she smiled like a Cheshire cat as she held out a newspaper to them.

“You two are celebrities.”

Peter starred at the British newspaper, the front page of which bore a large photo of the two of them in Tripoli in their uniforms with the headline “Spider-Man: An American Hero.”

“Spider-man?” Peter said, looking to Wade.

“That’s evidently what Allied forces are calling you,” Nat said, smirking. “I think it’s your SSR code-name now, right fellas?”

“Spider-man?” Sam asked, picking up the paper. “More like Spider-kid – Spider-ling?”

“Why doesn’t Wade have a code-name?” Peter asked as he gently elbowed Sam in the stomach.

“Because I’m not as adorable as you,” Wade giggled, pulling him into his lap for a kiss. “Spider-man.”

The Dirty Thirteen had a grand old time passing that newspaper around the mess tent and suggesting more appropriate code-names. Sam had the bright idea to make Peter a new uniform with a red-white-and-blue theme so he could be a proper American Hero. Wade eventually fashioned a breast plate out of the newspaper and wore it around base until Logan made him take it off. Peter rolled his eyes at their teasing, but in truth he felt a knot of anxiety forming in his stomach – if they were getting this kind of coverage from the Allied press, how long before May found out what he was really doing?

Months later, sure enough, they got a letter from May that sent her love and hope that they were both happy and out of danger and asked if they had ever met Spider-man. It seemed footage of Peter scaling a wall and webbing up a trio of Nazis in Austria had made it into some U.S. newsreels.

“What if she finds out?” Peter fretted.

“I think the bigger thing to worry about,” Wade said, serious for a change, “is what if the baddies find out about her?”

Peter’s blood ran cold. It had not occurred to him that he wasn’t just a soldier fighting other soldiers but a recognizable figure with powerful enemies. He went straight to Nat’s tent to talk about keeping his real name a secret, and the Dirty Thirteen cheerfully agreed to start referring to him only as Spider-man when they were in the field.

“You can trust them, baby,” Wade reassured him. “They may not smell great, but they’re good friends.”

The fact that Wade had friends was one of the other things that Peter loved about their new lives. Sure, Wade had hung around other guys back home in Queens, but they were punks, no good, just around because Wade was funny and good in a fight. Wade’s squad, on the other hand, genuinely liked and cared about him. And it showed – Wade’s swaggery exterior was still there, but the sweet kid who had seemed to only come out around Peter was there, too. When Peter shared this with Wade, Wade had hugged him tightly and said he felt the same way, so glad that Peter could let down his guard and not be so quick to anger.

A few weeks after that conversation, however, Peter’s anger made an appearance.

They were investigating a possible HYDRA cell outside of Morocco. Wade and Logan went into what seemed like the main opening of a cave while Peter and Nat looked for other openings in the cliff side. They had been searching for ten minutes when an explosion rocked the ground. Peter immediately swung back to the mouth of the cave to find Wade dragging Logan out into the light.

They were both burned, but Wade had gotten the worst of it. A large patch of his beautiful hair was just gone, and the rest was a smoldering, singed testament to how quick and hot the explosion had been. The skin down the right side of his body, from his face to his knee, was burned red and raw.

“He covered me,” Logan growled as they laid Wade out in the Jeep. “Stupid bastard, what’d you do that for?”

“So you’d owe me?” Wade slurred, grimacing in pain. Nat told him not to talk anymore, to just relax and they’d get him back to their camp. Peter rode with Wade’s head in his lap, staring at his burned skin, unable to stop thinking of what could have happened, what might still happen if Wade’s wounds got infected.

Luckily, Dr. Strange and Wong had come along for this particular mission.

“He’s delirious,” Logan told Dr. Strange as they got Wade laid out on a clean sheet. “Says he feels fine.”

“I do!” Wade insisted, sitting up. “I swear, it hurt like an ass full of red ants when it happened, but now it’s just kind of, I dunno – itchy.”

Peter reached out and tentatively touched Wade’s skin, and it didn’t look as bad as it had when he’d first come out of the cave, probably because he had been panicking then.

“You weren’t hurt?” Wong asked Logan as Dr. Strange slowly moved a shimmery field over Wade’s body with his hands. It occurred to Peter that he was starting to get used to magic the same way he was starting to get used to sudden explosions and violence.

“Nah,” Logan said, gesturing to his left leg. “Twisted my ankle when the blast threw us.”

“Your leg was fucking broken,” Wade said, pointing at his friend. “I saw it. I had to drag your ass out.”

“He did,” Nat said, looking curiously at Logan. “And it did look bad when we were back there.”

Wong and Dr. Strange took their sweet time waving shimmery force fields over both Wade and Logan while Peter waited, holding his breath and Wade’s hand.

 “Well, not only are your burns healing at an alarming rate,” Dr. Strange finally announced, “but your body appears to be healing your cancer faster than it can reassert itself.”

A vacuum seemed to open in the room. Dr. Strange’s eyes flickered between Wade and Peter, then to Wong, who sighed and shook his head. “I assumed that was public knowledge,” Dr. Strange said, clearing his throat.

“It was not,” Wade said, quietly. “But it’s – gone? It’s not there anymore?”

“It’s still there,” Wong corrected, casting a glance at Peter. “You still have cancer in your body, but your body is destroying the cancerous cells as fast as they can grow.”

“And your ankle has healed from a recent compound fracture,” Dr. Strange said to Logan, “so I think it’s safe to say that we have an idea of what Red Skull was injecting the two of you with in that lab.”

“Regenerative abilities,” Dr. Connors said when they arrived back at their base a few days later. He had taken blood from both Wade and Logan and, with help from the sorcerers, had identified a foreign chemical. “They injected you with some kind of self-healing serum.”

“Something we’ve been working on ourselves,” Nat mused, nodding at Dr. Connor’s arm which noticeably filled more of his sleeve than it had months ago. Peter hadn’t said anything because he wasn’t sure it was polite, but clearly the lizard powers were coming along.

“But Peter heals, too,” Howard pointed out. “Any chance HYDRA stole our research?”

“Peter’s healing factor is an unexpected by-product of the spider DNA,” Dr. Connors corrected.

“It’s also slow as Christmas,” Wade teased, giving Peter a sly grin.

Peter didn’t smile. “You’re in enough trouble as it is, buster.”

“I know,” Wade said in a low voice as the others continued their conversation. “I think you’d be well within your rights to take the belt to me later.”

Peter’s cock stirred at the thought, but he looked at Wade’s poor skin, still shiny and red in places from the burns, his poor head which he’d shaved clean to get rid of the singed hair. Peter was angry, but he didn’t want to hurt Wade – well, not in a way that wasn’t any fun, at least.

“Unless you’d rather not,” Wade said, looking away. “I know the lobster look isn’t exactly appealing.”

Peter gripped his hand. “I don’t care how you look,” he said. “You’re mine, and I’ll always want to beat your ass.”

Wade’s eyes softened, and he smiled, bringing Peter’s hand to his lips and kissing the knuckles.

Shortly thereafter Wade was bent over their cot, naked, trying not to cry out as Peter laid stroke after stroke across his ass and thighs with his own belt. When Peter checked in and saw actual tears on his sweetheart’s face, he decided that was enough, though anger still smoldered in his chest.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” Wade sniffled as Peter rubbed soothing ointment over the welts from the belt and his still-healing burns. “I swear I was gonna, I just wanted to – enjoy this for a little while.”

“Is this why you left?” Peter asked, trying to control his voice. “Is this why you stopped writing us?”

Wade laid his face on his hands where they rested on the cot. He nodded. Peter took a deep breath to calm himself.

“It was so awful,” Wade said in a small voice, “watching mama die from this. I couldn’t do that to you, not after what you’ve had to deal with already. When I started showing signs, things I remember happening to her early on, symptoms, I just – and then I got that letter from you –“

Peter stopped his ministrations and rested his head next to Wade’s on the cot, looking into those pretty blue eyes. “I wanted you,” Wade said, barely above a whisper. “So bad, Pete. For a long time. I was afraid I’d tell you in a letter and ruin your whole life. So I stopped writing.”

Peter pressed their foreheads together, closing his eyes, feeling a tear slide down either of his cheeks. He suddenly remembered sitting on the floor of his room, Wade sitting on his bed, both of them so young and so miserable and unable to comfort each other. He wished he could go back to that moment and tell both of those poor sad boys about this moment, what their futures held.

“But you’re okay,” Peter said, sitting up and wiping his face. “Whatever Red Skull did to you, it made you okay.”

“I still have it,” Wade reminded. “The serum, the magic could stop working.”

“We’re gonna keep living like we’re not worried about that,” Peter said. “We’re secret agents who hang around sorcerers and fight magical mad scientists. And I’m an American Hero.”

Wade laughed, and the sound filled Peter’s insides with warmth as it always did. The welts left by the belt had already started to disappear, and Wade’s burns had healed enough that he declared himself ready for action. Moments later, Peter ran his hands over the burn marks, some of which were turning into scars, over the smooth skin of Wade’s face and head as Wade rocked inside of him.

There was a list of moments Peter looked back on that he wished he had savored more, remembered more specifically. But how could he have known what would happen?

 They had two years, two beautiful years in the desert. When they were there, it seemed like an eternity, like it would go on forever.

*~*~*

“I think there’s something at the fortress.”

Peter raised an eyebrow at Nat. “The one where we found the squad?”

“I know it’s a long shot,” she said, shaking her head. “But I want to go back there.”

They’d cleaned the fortress out almost two years ago, after they were sure all the HYDRA operatives had fled. But in the past couple of months they hadn’t heard much from their old friend Red Skull. They’d found plenty of HYDRA agents, sure, but with the war winding down and no definite idea of where their main enemy was, Peter had sensed their work growing aimless.

“Let’s do it,” Peter said, taking a small puff of the cigarette Nat shared with him. “Maybe a long shot’s what we need right now.”

Just then, Wade rounded the corner and saw Peter with the cigarette in his mouth. “What the fuck is that, young man?” he demanded.

Peter grinned. He hated cigarettes, but occasionally letting Wade catch him with smoke on his breath yielded exciting results. Nat rolled her eyes as Wade took hold of Peter’s elbow and started marching him towards their tent.

“You two perverts try to get some sleep tonight,” she teased, “because we’re leaving early.”

The next day, Howard, Nat, Peter, and Wade took two Jeeps and headed back to the fortress. Since they were only doing recon and felt confident the place was abandoned, they hadn’t seen the point in bringing more agents along.

“Will you marry me?”

Peter looked away from the bumpy road to see Wade gazing at him. “Say again?”

“Remember when you asked me to marry you?” Wade said, sliding closer to him. “You couldn’t have been older than five.”

Peter blushed as he wrestled with the stiff steering wheel. He remembered – he’d even had a ring from the dime store because he knew that’s how Ben had asked May. Marriage, to five-year-old Peter, was getting to live with your favorite person and be around them all of the time. Eight-year-old Wade had hugged him tightly and told him that if he married anybody it would be Peter, but they had to grow up first.

“Are you finally accepting my proposal?” Peter smirked. “I think I’ve still got the ring somewhere.”

“I don’t need a ring, mister,” Wade said, nuzzling at his neck. “A cheap floozy like me would settle for a firm hand-shake.”

Peter laughed but pulled away, correcting the wheel to get them back on the smoothest possible terrain. “We can be firm with each other once we’re parked.”

The fortress looked exactly as they’d left it two years before. Peter felt a chill run through his body as they walked into the burned-out entrance, expecting a horde of Nazi magicians to come barreling towards them. It was perfectly quiet except for the sounds of the desert at dusk.

“Found your tank,” Howard grinned, pointing at the tank sitting on its side at the end of a huge gash mark that tore the ground.

“Funny,” Peter said, dryly. He’d gotten good at dealing with Howard. “How should we go?”

“We’ll head to the weapons lab,” Nat said. “You two start with the lab where you found Wade.”

As they made their way up the winding stairs, Peter couldn’t stop thinking about carrying Wade out of the fortress, not able to tell him who he was, bursting with happiness and fear that they wouldn’t make it out to enjoy their reunion. He reached over and squeezed Wade’s shoulder since both of his hands were holding his rifle at the ready.

When they entered the lab, Peter’s skin crawled with what he’d come to think of as his spider-sense. “Somebody’s been here,” he whispered to Wade. “Might still be here.”

Wade nodded. “Go ahead and look around with your science smarts, I’ll watch your back.”

Though his hair stood on end, Peter smiled to himself. He thought of years of alleys in Queens and bullies and always knowing that Wade would watch his back, whether he wanted him to or not. He pulled the high-tech camera that Howard had made from his bag and started photographing everything in the lab, even things that didn’t look important, opening drawers and collecting empty vials, just in case trace chemicals could be found.

A sound down the corridor made them both look up. “Gimme ten,” Wade said, “then follow.”

Peter nodded, and Wade gave him a wink before heading down the hallway, toward the room with the cages. Peter made himself count slowly to ten, and he was about to leap to the ceiling to go after Wade when –

“Peter?”

The voice, hearing that voice in this place, was so disorienting that Peter thought he’d imagined it. He turned around to the table where he’d found Wade two years ago and saw May strapped to it.

“Peter, help me,” she begged, her sweet face full of pain and fear.

Peter moved without thinking, pulling at the leather straps with his great strength. They wouldn’t budge. “May, how – what?” he stuttered.

“No time,” she said in a desperate whisper, “he’s coming back --!”

Peter pulled at the straps with all his might, frantically moving from her wrists to her ankles, finding no success. He started yanking open drawers looking for a knife, a scalpel, anything that might work.

“I’ll get you out of here, May,” he said as he searched. This was his fault, his worst fear come true – he’d been so stupidly reckless, he shouldn’t have let anyone know his real name ever, not even his team, he should’ve worn a mask from the beginning and never taken it off –

And then he realized that he was Spider-man. He had his mask on. Like he always did in the field. May Parker had no idea that her nephew was Spider-man.

That was when he heard the scuffle coming from down the corridor, where Wade had gone. He looked back at the table and found, as he’d dreaded, no one tied there. It had been an illusion, what he’d thought he was seeing when he’d found Wade in that same place, but that had been real and this had been a trick to separate him from –

“Wade!” Peter shouted, running down the narrow corridor. He reached the window where he’d entered the fortress that night, looked down, and saw a broad balcony just a floor below. On it was a strange, helicopter-like machine, propellers beating up a mighty wind, and Wade struggling with another person.

Peter shot web as he threw himself from the window, thrilled to see it encase the figure Wade was fighting. As he landed, he saw that instead of a head the figure had a mirrored sphere, perfectly round, reflecting the desert sunset. Wade was holding the webbed-up figure at the end of his rifle, shouting at him, when suddenly another figure emerged from the flying machine.

Peter couldn’t hear over the awful racket of the propellers, but he saw the red mouth, gapping out of the skull like something from a nightmare, uttering some declaration and holding what looked like a wand out towards Wade. Peter jerked his web, trying to pull the other figure, to capture him, to try to distract Red Skull, he didn’t know, but Red Skull reached out with one hand and, with impossible strength, grabbed his companion by the arm. Peter could hear the mirror-headed person scream over the noise as their shoulder was dislocated, torn between Peter’s strength and the Skull’s. Wade continued to shout, holding Red Skull at the end of his rifle, and Peter pulled again with all he had in him, feeling the figure give in Red Skull’s grasp.

And then, some sort of light shot from the end of the wand-like object, struck Wade, and he disappeared.

Peter fell to his knees, dropping the web, which was exactly what Red Skull had hoped would happen. He hoisted his companion into the flying machine. Peter leapt up and made a running lunge, shooting web at the machine, but as he watched the mirror-headed figure held up his good arm and the webbing bounced away from the machine, as if by magic. Of course by magic. He radioed Nat and Howard, telling them to get to the Jeeps to track the flying machine, but it had already disappeared in the sky.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANK YOU to Bexorz for creating this unspeakably gorgeous art it is SO SO PERFECT!!!


	7. Chapter 7

Peter scrubbed the material of his Spider-man mask against itself, watching the water turn red. He wouldn’t bother with the rest of his uniform, but the blood stains on his mask were distracting, and he could not let himself be distracted.

They had been on the trail of Red Skull for two months. Since leaving the fortress, they’d tracked him down. He would lay low for days, clearly thinking he’d shaken them, then show his hand in a new spot and find that the SSR was right there waiting to pounce, brutally and efficiently. They had to have taken out most of his forces, but the magician himself escaped each time they found him. In the last two weeks, they hadn’t seen or heard any sign of HYDRA – Red Skull was hunkering down, afraid to act. Peter was frustrated that they didn’t have him, but it gave him a dark satisfaction to know that the monster was afraid of them. Of him.

He hadn’t kept track of how many HYDRA operatives he’d killed. No one else did. Why should he? He was finally doing what he was supposed to do, finally being a soldier.

Now they were back at their base in the desert, regrouping and focused on discovering what Red Skull’s full plan was, where he might be hiding. Peter’s mind and body had been constantly occupied for two months, since the last time – since Red Skull and his partner had escaped them at the fortress, and this reprieve felt like torture. He scrubbed at his mask and fought the panic rising in his chest.

“What do you want me to do? He’s a grown man,” Peter heard Nat say just outside of the tent he was crouched in. He stilled his hands to listen to the conversation.

“He’s a kid,” he heard Sam say. “And he’s killing people all the sudden.”

“We all kill people,” Nat responded. “There’s lots of kids over here killing other kids – it’s called a war.”

“You know what we mean,” he heard Logan’s voice rumble.

“He has a right to grieve however he needs to,” Nat said, sharply, “and if it makes him do things that scare the hell out of the enemy, then so much the better for us.”

“He’s not grieving at all,” Logan said, more emotion in his voice than Peter had ever heard, not even when the man had tried to talk to him right after – after the fortress. “He’s having a rough time and he needs our help.”

Peter had heard enough. He silently left the tent on the opposite side from where his friends were worrying over him, wandering out into the night. He found some wreckage that they had recovered from a train – they’d ambushed it, hoping to finally trap Red Skull, but he had derailed it and somehow escaped them. Again. Peter started sorting the twisted, hulking pieces of metal into a stack of re-usable and a stack of trash.

He sensed another presence and realized Dr. Strange was approaching him in the twilight. The sorcerer stood and watched him sort metal for a while before speaking. “This is useless work,” he said, no trace of pity in his tone. “At least do useful work.”

Peter dropped the gigantic axel he was holding and turned to the sorcerer, expectantly.

“I have equipment from the fortress that needs analyzing,” Dr. Strange suggested. “And you know your way around a lab.”

Peter had assumed that they would be using magic to examine all the equipment and evidence they’d brought back from Red Skull’s fortress, but when he joined Wong and Dr. Strange in their lab he found they were using a mix of magic and good old fashioned forensic science. This work was better than sorting train parts – he could plug his whole brain into the meticulous steps, focus all of his energy into microscopes and Petri dishes.

“I’m so sorry about Wade,” Wong said. “It’s not fair at all, what happened.”

They had been working in silence for at least an hour, but Peter had sensed this was coming. He kept looking intently at the beaker he held in front of him. He realized he’d left his mask in the tent where he’d been trying to scrub the blood out of it. He felt very exposed.

“The worst part,” Dr. Strange chimed in, looking at the instrument he was examining and not at Peter, “is people telling you that it’ll get better with time. I hate that.”

Wong let out a bitter laugh. “Fools. It’s a mystery how we survive losing people we love. But we do it.”

The two sorcerers continued with their work on either side of him, not looking at him, not needing a response. They had just given him their words, just wanting to let him know that they knew what it was like, that they understood.

 _I know, baby boy,_ Wade whispered in his mind from years ago, holding him in an alley while he grieved over his uncle, over the fact that it wasn’t getting better with time. He could fight every bully in Queens, kill every HYDRA agent in the world, and it wouldn’t get any better.

“He asked me to marry him,” Peter said. His voice was hoarse, and he realized he hadn’t used it in hours.

He could see Dr. Strange go still out of the corner of his eye. Wong seemed to turn away. “Well, what’d you tell him?” Strange asked.

 “Nothing,” Peter said. “I thought he was kidding around.”

But he hadn’t been, Peter now understood. It was as if Wade knew what was about to happen, that he was about to vanish without a trace and that they were spending their last moments together in that Jeep.

Dr. Strange nodded and said nothing. Wong put a warm, steady hand on his shoulder for a moment. Then the three of them continued their painstaking work, staying in the lab long into the night.

“Time and dimension,” Dr. Strange told Nat and Howard when they found them still in the lab at dawn. “That seems to be the focus of – all of this.”

“The guy with the mirror-head,” Nat said, placing a file down on the table, “calls himself Mysterio.”

“HYDRA must be trying to compete with our nifty codenames,” Howard quipped.

“He’s American, and he’s wanted for a few things, but mostly theft of a bunch of government equipment,” Nat explained. “It seems like HYDRA recruited him specifically to help Red Skull with his pet project.”

“Which is, apparently,” Strange continued, “to create self-healing soldiers and send them into the future, or the past, or to other dimensions, or all of the above.”

“Were they trying to make them immortal?” Peter asked.

The lab was quiet for a moment, and Peter wasn’t sure if that was because the thought of immortal HYDRA agents running wild through time was so horrifying or because he’d actually spoken.

“I’m sure that’s the ultimate goal,” Nat said. “Any idea how far they’ve gotten with the traveling through time and dimensions bit?”

“They may be able to do it,” Strange said, grimly. “Time travel, anyway, on a small scale.”

Peter listened as Dr. Strange explained how he knew that Mysterio and Red Skull had figured out how to send people through time, which was basically because there was time-travel dust on all of the materials they’d taken from the fortress. Peter couldn’t stop imagining Wade lost in time, wondering where Peter was and when he would come for him. He wasn’t sure if that was better or worse than Wade being dead. He didn’t suppose there was much difference as he’d never see him again in either case.

Their little meeting in the lab ended with Nat saying that since they’d lost Red Skull there was no way to use any of their new discoveries. Wong and Strange wanted to recreate the Nazi magician’s experiments as much as possible, and Peter stayed and helped until the sun went down again. The sorcerers called it an early night, something about having been awake for forty-eight hours straight. Peter left the lab in search of something else to do.

He found Logan propped against the side of the medic building, his cigar glowing against the desert sky. “Bunk with us tonight,” he said, gruffly. “So it won’t be so awful that he’s not there.”

Too numb and too exhausted to argue, Peter followed him to the tent where the Dirty Thirteen all slept in a smelly, scruffy puppy-pile. A few of them greeted him, but in general they minded their own business, settling down to sleep as if it wasn’t unusual that Peter was there.

Logan thrust a bowl of what looked like oatmeal into Peter’s hands. “You gotta eat. That spider metabolism of yours’ll make your body eat itself if you’re not careful.”

Peter was pretty sure he’d never heard Logan use the word “metabolism” before, and he realized that Doc Connors must have told him to say that part. He ate as much as he could stomach and laid down on a bare patch of ground with the blanket Sam had thrown at him, close to the other soldiers but not among them.

The next morning, he was given several letters from May that had arrived while they’d been on their wild goose chase. She told him how the newsreels and headlines back in the States made it sound as if the war would be ending soon, that Hitler was on the run and that the Japanese would fall soon after. Peter was struck by how separated the SSR was from the rest of the Allies’ militaries – the war wasn’t close to over for them, not until they tracked down Red Skull and rooted out every HYDRA agent. May said she hoped that they would be able to come home soon, both of them, that she couldn’t wait to hold her boys again.

Peter was staring at the letter, wondering desperately what he could possibly write back to her, when Howard appeared at the entrance of his tent. “Boss wants you,” he said, meaning Nat.

“Spidey,” Howard said, stopping Peter as he stood to leave the tent, “we’re gonna find him. I know that bastard sent him through time, and that means he’s alive, and we’ll figure out where he is. Nothing’s impossible if you’re smart enough.”

Peter made himself nod and put a hand on Howard’s shoulder for a moment before he moved past him, headed for Nat’s office.

He found Nat sitting at her makeshift desk with Dr. Connors standing in the somewhat dark corner, and he was reminded suddenly of the first time he’d met the two of them.

“Got some intel,” she said when she saw him. He stood, waiting to hear what it was, but Nat gave him a funny look and said, “Sit down for this one.”

He sat, having no idea what to prepare himself for. There was nothing else they could take from him, was there? But Nat looked like she might be sick, just like when she’d told him two months ago that no one had found any sign of Wade in or around the fortress.

“We think Red Skull is in the Alps,” she said, “in an old Nazi hide-out that might have the conditions he needs to keep going with his project. You and the sorcerers really outdid yourselves with the forensics stuff.”

“When do we leave?” he asked immediately.

She put a hand out, as if telling him to wait. Peter felt a rush of fury – what were they sitting around for if they knew where that evil bastard was?

“Did you know that your parents were SSR?”

Peter blinked at her. He’d been having trouble remembering whether or not he was wearing his Spider-man mask lately, and he touched his face to see that he was not.

“They were,” she told him, “both of them, since before you were born. In 1930, they were sent undercover to work for Red Skull as scientists. They funneled a lot of information back to the SSR before they got made and Red Skull – executed them.”

Peter stared down at the file that Nat pushed toward him and saw two official SSR dossiers, small pictures of his parents attached to them. He supposed he had an SSR file like this now.

“Did you know them?” he asked.

“I met them,” Nat replied, quietly, “once.”

Peter remembered the night he’d been woken up by a car outside of May and Ben’s place. He remembered hearing adult voices talk downstairs, heard what he thought was crying, and he’d stayed in bed, afraid. He remembered May and Ben coming into his room, May holding him as Ben told him that his mother and father were gone. He remembered that first time that the world had dropped out from under him because it felt just as terrifying, just as unimaginably horrible when it had been Ben and now that it was Wade. And now it turned out the same bastard had taken most of the people he loved from him – would it turn out that the burglar who’d shot Ben was somehow also the Red Skull?

Peter started laughing, quietly at first, then loudly. He could see Nat and Dr. Connors exchange looks of fear and concern, but he couldn’t stop. He didn’t care to stop.

He sensed Nat reach a hand out towards him. “Pete—“

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Peter asked, laughing fit suddenly over. “Is this why you recruited me?”

“No,” Nat said, looking him in the eye. “I noticed you for all the reasons I told you. I didn’t know you were Mary and Richard Parker’s kid until I started digging into your background.”

“Why didn’t you tell me then?” Peter seethed.

“I was going to tell you when we got to Africa,” Nat said, her voice rising uncharacteristically. “But then you told me you didn’t want to kill anybody and I wanted – I don’t know, to respect that, and I thought if you knew Red Skull had killed your parents you wouldn’t be able to help it.”

That person, the eighteen year old kid who spooked himself with his sudden strength, seemed very far away at the moment. “Why are you telling me now?” he asked.

“Because that’s where he is,” Nat said, pointing to the intel they’d received on the Alps compound. “This is where your parents were stationed, where he killed them. And I don’t think you should go there with us.”

“You can’t do it without both me and Wade,” Peter said. “This place’ll be covered in HYDRA.”

“The sorcerers are putting us right on the grounds of the compound,” Nat said. “And we have a new asset.”

Peter followed her glance into the corner at Dr. Connors. Peter hadn’t seen him in two months, not since they’d stopped briefly by their base before following Red Skull’s trail. Now that he looked closely, he could see that it had been an eventful two months for his friend.

The arm that had been missing when Peter met Dr. Connors had gradually re-grown over two years, but there were suddenly more changes to his appearance. His eyes, usually sharp but timid, looked odd around the pupils; his skin looked textured; his nose had flattened out into an almost reptilian shape. Peter tried to gauge Dr. Connor’s reaction to his own appearance, whether he was standing in the shadow because he was afraid or ashamed.

“He can do everything you can, just about,” Nat said. “And on top of that, he looks fucking terrifying.”

“Are you serious?” Peter asked, looking at Dr. Connors.

“It’s true,” he said, tentatively. “It’s a little unstable but I can fight.”

Peter was probably imagining that his voice had a slight hiss to it. “We can stop them,” Peter said to Nat. “With two super-powered agents, we can do it.”

“We don’t need you,” Nat insisted. “With Howard’s suit and the wings he built for Sam and Logan’s healing factor, that’s four big hitters, not to mention me and the sorcerers.”

“Are you ordering me to stay behind?” Peter asked, leaning close to get in her face.

“No,” she said, getting right back in his face. “I’m saying you’ve been running on rage and it’s not gonna end well.”

“It didn’t seem to bother you,” he hissed, “when I was an angry, confused teenager who you gave super-powers and then pointed in the direction that was useful for you.”

Nat pulled back, nostrils flaring. He’d stung her, he could tell, but she’d stung him pretty good, too. “Have it your way, then,” she said, shoving the intel files towards him. “We’ll leave as soon as Doc feels like he’s trained enough.”

Nat turned on her heel and walked out of the tent, shoving the canvas door out of her way.

“Will you help me?” Dr. Connors asked.

“Of course,” Peter said, putting his hand on his friend’s shoulder and noticing suddenly that there was a long, thick tail coming out from the back of his lab coat. They would certainly have the element of surprise on their side.

Peter trained with Dr. Connors for two days. His friend could not only match him in speed and strength but he could also produce claws if he concentrated, though the process looked uncomfortable. It disturbed Peter to see the doctor so changed suddenly, and it didn’t help the general sense he had that the world was not real anymore.

_Can you lay eggs, baby boy?_

Peter heard Wade’s voice in his head, and the memory followed it. They had only made love a handful of times then. Wade smiled impishly when he asked the question. Peter slapped him on his bare thigh, and Wade shifted his long body on top of him.

“And you’re sure you can’t, uh, make web?” Wade coupled his question with a suggestive look toward Peter’s nether regions.

“I’m sure,” Peter rolled his eyes, slotting his knee between Wade’s legs to try to get him interested in another subject.

Wade hummed, skeptically. “I dunno, maybe I oughta check—“

Peter had laughed helplessly as Wade dove under the thin white sheet and very thoroughly checked every bit of him.

Once Peter let Nat know that Dr. Connors felt prepared, they quickly planned their attack. Logan, Nat, and Wong all had good strategies worked out, but Peter didn’t believe any of them would be enough to successfully infiltrate the compound and neutralize both the Red Skull and Mysterio. He offered his own plan, and it was received about as well as he’d expected.

“No,” Logan said, gruffly. “Too stupid. We’re not losing you, too.”

“I was there when they – did whatever they did to Wade,” Peter said, “they saw me. And they’ve seen me leading the charge every time we’ve gotten close to them in the last couple of months. They’ll believe I’m trying to take them out on my own.”

“I can’t help but notice that in your plan,” Nat said, narrowing her eyes at him, “you end up alone with Red Skull, even after we ambush them.”

Peter said nothing, just held her gaze.

“It’s a good plan,” Wong said. “You might end up dead, but either way it’ll give us time to get in.”

Logan frowned but didn’t protest any more. He couldn’t – it was a good plan. It would work.

In his tent, their tent, the tent he hadn’t slept in for months, Peter gathered his belongs. There wasn’t much, but he wanted to make it easy in case he didn’t come back from his. He picked up the most recent letter from May, where she’d said how excited she was to be able to have both her boys home soon, and carefully put in the satchel where they kept all of their letters.

All of Wade’s letters to Peter, the ones he’d brought with him from home, and all of Peter’s letter to Wade, that Wade had carried with him across continents and all over the desert, and every letter May had sent the two of them, all of them were gathered together in this small leather bag. Peter tried to resist the urge to pull out the three bundles, each wrapped carefully in twine, but he found himself holding the stack of May’s letters. What would be the point of killing Red Skull if it meant hurting May worse than she was already going to be, if it meant Peter never made it home to her?

His senses alerted him to Nat’s presence only a moment before she parted the tent flap. “What’s that?” she asked, not coming inside.

“Letters,” Peter shrugged. “What do you need?”

They hadn’t talked in days, not since their fight. Nat came into the tent and moved next to him, pulling the satchel open slightly so that she could see its contents. “That’s a lot of letters.”

Peter nodded. They stood next to each other in silence for a while, not moving, not looking at each other.

“Peter, I’m so sorry.”

He was horrified to hear tears in her voice, but he still didn’t look at her, he couldn’t. He just shook his head. “It’s not your fault.”

“It is,” she said, struggling for control. “I got you into this mess. You’d be home with your aunt. Maybe Wade would even have made it out of this if not for me.”

Unable to stand it anymore, Peter turned to Nat and wrapped his arms around her, tucking his chin against her shoulder. After a moment of resisting, she hugged him back.

“I’m sorry for what I said,” Peter said, his own voice thick with tears. “You’re the best friend I ever had next to Wade, you’ve always had my back—“

“Don’t die, all right?” she said, squeezing him tighter. “Kill him if you need to, but—“

“I won’t,” Peter said, pulling back so that he could look at her to show her he meant it. “I won’t die.”

Everyone – the Dirty Thirteen, Dr. Connors, Spider-man, Howard in his armor, and Nat were arranged in two lines, one for each of the sorcerers. As Peter watched, Strange and Wong waved their hands in deliberate patterns and each opened a sparking ring in the air through which snowy mountains were visible. They had never traveled this way before, afraid to let Red Skull know that they had sorcerers on their side. The fact that this time they were willing to risk it just drove home the reality that this was it – end game.

But Peter was going to live. He had decided.

“Just step through,” Wong told him, “like a door.”

Peter knew exactly where he’d be when he went through the portal, but looking at it was still disorienting. He thought of May, of her sweet face, and promised himself again – he was going to live.

“Twenty minutes,” Nat reminded. “We’ll be right behind you.”

Peter grasped her hand briefly. Then, he stepped through the portal and was suddenly hundreds of miles away.

The compound was nestled among snowy cliffs, leaving it vulnerable only on one side. Shivering, Peter webbed his way across the mountain and over the compound’s roof to the locked window that he easily broke. Once inside, he crawled quickly along the ceiling of the hallways, reminded of the fortress in the desert where his life had changed twice. Stone and dark, winding corridors seemed to be a HYDRA trademark.

The Red Skull was exactly where Peter thought he would be – in his lab, at the heart of the compound, safe as he could possibly be. Strange and Wong had warned him that, while they would do all they could to counteract any magic booby-traps in the compound, there was a good chance that Red Skull would know he was coming.

“Hello, Spider-man.”

Peter stopped. He watched the red, bare head tilt up, not looking in a particular direction. If he didn’t know precisely where he was, Peter could still make this work.

“Where’s your friend?” Peter asked, quickly moving away from the spot where he’d spoken.

To his relief, Red Skull turned toward the sound. “Elsewhere and safe,” he said, his accent making his words clean and crisp. “Unlike your friend, Captain Wilson.”

“You’re keeping him safe but not yourself? That’s sweet.”

“I am always safe,” Red Skull sneered, turning in the direction of where Peter had spoken.

Only Peter was no longer there. He had managed to maneuver behind the Nazi magician and was slowly lowering himself down from the ceiling with this web.

“You and your organization are a pebble in the river of history,” Red Skull continued, still turned away from where Peter was. “You have no relationship with the future—“

“Don’t we?”

Peter felt a thrill of satisfaction at the surprised look in those pitted eyes when Red Skull turned around to see him, but he didn’t have long to revel in his success as ten HYDRA agents were suddenly on him. But that was all right – this was the plan.

“You don’t,” Red Skull picked up their conversation now that Peter was being held back by his goons. “Your crusade ends here, with your foolish attempt to challenge me on your own. Though I must say, I’m not surprised – you’ve been reckless since you lost your better half.”

Perfect – just as Peter had thought, they would have no trouble believing he’d come after them by himself. As Red Skull continued monologuing, he scanned the room, hoping to see Mysterio emerge from the shadows, but there was no sign of the mirror-headed figure. Maybe they weren’t stupid or arrogant enough to let their guard completely down just yet – Peter clearly needed to create more of a distraction.

Using more of his strength than he normally did, Peter reared back and threw his arms forward, sending the HYDRA agents who’d been holding him clear across the lab to land with painful slaps against the far wall. Ten more rushed in to take their place, and Peter saw Red Skull back up to a console and press a button, shouting for more troops to come to him. Peter sighed with relief even as he dodged gunfire – the more HYDRA he could get to the lab, the easier things would be for Nat and the others.

But as more HYDRA troops poured into the lab, firing weapons at him, the less likely it was that he could get out of this alive.

Just as he was beginning to get a little desperate, a gigantic lizard crashed in from the ceiling. As shocked as he was to see Doc Connors’ full transformation, he couldn’t help but laugh as HYDRA agents shot at him and missed in their panic, many of them screaming and fleeing the room. They would run right into Nat and Howard and the Dirty Thirteen, Peter knew. The compound was surrounded, Doc Connors was dealing with the goons who hadn’t already run, leaving Peter free to deal with –

“Red Skull!” he shouted at the fleeing figure. He chased the coward out of the lab and pursued him onto a stone balcony. He’d been trying to get to another of his flying machines, no doubt, but Peter caught him in a mass of web and pulled him backwards. As he was preparing to grapple him to the ground, the Skull caught him with a right hook. Peter registered that he was incredibly strong, had probably used himself as a test subject for his super serum.

The Skull gave him quite a fight, and part of Peter was glad. Every time he landed a hard hit and the Red Skull recovered and came back in for more, it was another chance to hurt him. They traded blows back and forth until Peter bashed his own head against the red forehead with all of this strength. His vision went white, but he somehow managed to pin his enemy to the ground and started blindly punching.

Red Skull cackled madly as Peter drove punch after punch into his face. For a moment, Peter thought they’d be frozen in time like that, like it would go on and on. But then the Skull stopped laughing, and it wasn’t as hard for Peter to restrain him, and his eyes changed.

 _You’re not like that, Peter,_ he heard Wade’s voice in his head. _If you were big and strong, you wouldn’t hurt anybody._

But this time it wasn’t a burglar beneath him, near death. It was a Nazi, worse than a Nazi, a powerful man who had used his power to hurt people and who was fiercely determined to control and terrorize all of humanity, all of existence. Peter wasn’t murdering him, he thought as blood and saliva flew out of the Red Skull’s face, he was executing him.

Suddenly the Skull’s arms, which had been lying still beneath Peter’s knees, slipped free, and he reached up to grasp Peter’s face. It was so shocking, so unexpected that Peter froze.

“Don’t you want to know where I sent him, Spider-man?” Red Skull grinned, spit and blood oozing through his teeth. “Before you kill me, don’t you want to know where he is?”

“Where is he?” Peter growled, clutching the Skull’s face in his own hands. Red Skull cackled, and Peter was about to put his thumbs into the pitted eyes to pop them like ripe grapes --

Suddenly there were arms around his waist, pulling him up. _Wade_ , he thought, his body remembering a thousand instances of Wade pulling him off of a bully just like this. But he turned and saw the mirror-headed man, Mysterio, struggling to subdue him.

Peter pushed back with his legs and knocked his entire body into the other villain with all of this might, sending them both flying backwards uncontrollably. He heard Red Skull cackling and Mysterio crying out, and then he felt his own stomach swoop sickeningly as they crashed into and toppled over the balcony railing.

The air hurtled past Peter’s face. Mysterio grabbed for him, panicking and screaming. Peter flung his arm out in the direction of the stone wall of the compound, willing his web to connect, his heart leaping as he felt it catch. He was going to live.

As he was readying his arm to catch hold of the web and Mysterio, he saw in the cloaked figure’s hands a small object. A wand. He tried to shout, to knock it out of his grasp, but there was a blinding flash of light and then nothing.

*~*~*

Peter could feel the mask pressing against his face, trapping his breath. He was panting. He opened his eyes and saw a high, glass ceiling.

A figure came into his view. A man. He had a beard but it was thin and angular, not unlike the unusual way that Dr. Strange wore his. But that was not the member of his team that this man most reminded him of.

“Howard,” he muttered.

“Oh, shit,” the man said, looking from Peter to the other side the room. Peter followed his eyes and saw two young women standing together, both in suits.

“Spider-man?” the blonde-headed woman asked, approaching him tentatively.

“What the hell happened?” Peter asked. He’d been brought up not to swear in front of women, but he’d been around Nat too long. And something about these women reminded him of Nat.

“I’m Agent Stacy,” said the blonde woman. “We’re with SHIELD. The SSR to you, I guess.”

Peter pushed himself into a seated position. His head pulsed with pain. He looked around the room and saw sleek, metallic equipment, screens floating in the air. Through the glass walls of the room he could see outside where a gigantic letter “A” hung proudly off of whatever building this was.

“What happened?” he repeated, not understanding why dread had filled his insides.

“You’ve been lost for a long time,” Agent Stacy said, coming closer to him, kneeling. “You’re safe, though. You’re in Avengers Tower, and we’re the good guys.”

He’d been fighting the Red Skull and Mysterio. They wanted to send super soldiers through dimensions, through time.

“What year is it?” Peter asked.

He had hoped the ridiculous question would provoke laughter and strange looks from the other people in the room. Instead, Agent Stacy exchanged troubled glances with the other woman and the man.

“It’s 2016,” said the other woman, red-headed. “You’ve jumped seventy-one years into the future.”


	8. Chapter 8

“That’s all of them.”

Peter stared at the dossiers spread all over the table. Tony had initially tried to show these to him on a screen, but Peter had not been able to handle that. Tony had complained the entire time but had brought him actual physical files, and that more than anything drove home that he really was Howard’s son.

The fates of his friends were all laid out in front of him. Sam Wilson – retired from the SSR in the 1950s, became a VA therapist and had ten grandkids. Logan – MIA in the 1990s, presumed alive because of his healing factor, which had just gotten stronger in the years Peter had missed. Dr. Curtis Connors, aka The Lizard, killed in Russia in the 1970s. Howard Stark –

“Was he assassinated?” Peter asked, seeing that Howard and his wife, Maria, had been found dead.

Tony nodded with a tight smile. “Made to look like a car accident. Turns out it was some HYDRA ghost agent called Deadpool. Responsible for over a hundred assassinations since the forties, probably a bunch of different people, same scary mask.”

So HYDRA hadn’t disappeared. Maybe if Peter had been with them they would’ve won. Or he would’ve died when everyone he knew did.

The last dossier was Nat. Natasha Romanoff, Natalia Alianovna Romanova. He hadn’t known she was Russian. He’d guess that she had a rough childhood, but the things in her file, the Red Room – horrible. Why in two years of fighting side by side had he never asked her? She had founded SHIELD, the bigger organization that SSR had turned into, along with Howard. She had never stopped looking for Peter, and she had only died about ten years before now.

Now. 2016.

“My dad and Natasha,” Tony said, “they never gave up on you. ‘Nothing’s impossible if you’re smart enough,’ if I had a nickel for every time I heard that.”

“How did you know I’d end up here?” Peter asked, gesturing at the giant metal frame that he’d evidently hurtled through only minutes ago. “How were you ready for me?”

“We had a message,” explained Agent Watson, the red-headed SHIELD operative. “From Dr. Strange. We have the film if you’d like to see it.”

Stephen Strange’s and Wong’s dossiers had told him that they were also MIA, presumed alive but unreachable, lost somewhere in the cosmos. Just like Peter.

“No,” Peter said, standing from the table. This furniture, this room, all of the shapes and materials were all so foreign, so wrong. “I need to leave, this is –“

“It’s a lot,” said Agent Stacy, the other SHIELD operative. “What can we do, what do you need?”

What did he need? He needed to go home. He needed to be with this squad, with Nat, in the desert. He needed to be with Wade in their tent, tired and happy to be alive. He needed to be in his walk-up, at the dinner table, with May –

May. 2016. She was born in –

“Easy, Tiger,” Agent Watson said, taking hold of his shoulder. “This is too much to take in at once, Tony, what the hell were you thinking?”

“He asked!” Tony defended as Agent Stacy gathered the dossiers of everyone Peter knew.

“Let’s get you in a bunk and have somebody check you over,” Agent Watson said to Peter, trying to get him to look her in the eyes. “You were just fighting Mysterio and the Red Skull, right?”

“Yes,” Peter said. His heart felt less like it was going to explode – Watson was smart, getting him to look backwards instead of forwards.

“We need to tell him everything at some point,” Tony sighed. “Those douche-bags are gonna come back and he’s the only way we stand a chance.”

“Against what?” Peter asked, giving up on figuring out what “douche-bag” meant.

“Against HYDRA,” Tony said, grimly. “Mysterio and Red Skull are still around and they’ve been attacking major cities with an army of super soldiers. When Mysterio zapped the two of you, he ended up in 1986, hooked back up with Red Skull, and now they’re rolling out their thirty year plan.”

Peter realized he still had his Spider-man mask on. He tore it off his head and sucked in a huge breath, panting as if he’d been running for miles.

“Jesus,” he heard Tony mutter. “How old are you?”

“Twenty,” Peter snarled. “Or doesn’t my file say that?”

“You don’t have much of a file,” Agent Stacy said, handing him a thin folder. “Agent Romanoff and Mr. Stark wanted to keep your identity private.”

He opened the file to see a very brief profile of his abilities, the missions he’d been involved in and what he’d done. No mention of his name, no personal information, and the only pictures were of him in his Spider-man uniform. Nat and Howard had known he wanted to keep May out of danger.

“Dr. Strange said that you could help us,” Tony said. “I know this is a lot to deal with, but we need you. Earth needs you. We need Spider-man.”

Peter looked Tony right in the eye and threw his file back onto the table. “No.”

Tony reeled as if Peter had hit him. “No?”

“No,” Peter repeated. “I did my time. I’m over ninety-years old and I’m not doing anything else for SSR or SHIELD or anybody else who’s asking.”

“You were friends with my dad,” Tony reminded, leaning across the table. “He never shut up about you, how brave you were, how strong you were. If you hadn’t gotten yourself tossed into the future maybe they could have stopped these fuckers in the 1940s, but they didn’t and they’re here now and you’re here. Help us.”

Peter grabbed the edge of the table and threw it effortlessly across the room. He hit some machinery that he hoped was delicate and expensive.

“You’re not your dad, and you don’t know me,” he said, then turned and headed for what looked like a door. He expected someone to come after him, and he hoped it wasn’t one of the lady SHIELD agents because they had tried their best to be kind and he didn’t want to hurt them.

“Are you seriously gonna walk around Manhattan wearing a Spider-man costume?” he heard Tony call as the door-like thing slid open by magic and he quickly slid through it.

He hated to admit that Tony had a good point, but he nabbed a coat off of a hallway rack before breaking a window and scuttling his way down to the street. After walking among the people of 2016 Manhattan for a few minutes, he thought he probably hadn’t needed to cover up. People looked so strange – their hair, their clothing, their shoes, even their faces. He was used to being around a lot of different kinds of folks, both from the military and from growing up in Queens, but all of these people looked alien to him – cold and unknowable. He got a few compliments on his “Spider-man costume” and one person called him a faggot, which was almost comfortingly familiar.

At least the trains were kind of the same. He had made it underground and was trying to watch others to figure out how to get a ticket when his skin prickled at a familiar presence drawing near.

“At least let us help you get where you want to go,” said Agent Watson, Agent Stacy close behind her. Peter nodded his agreement and told the agents that he wanted to go to Queens. They gave each other a worried look but guided him through the turn-style and onto the train.

“So you’re from Queens?”

Peter looked up from the filthy floor at Agent Watson and nodded.

“Me, too,” she said, smiling awkwardly. “Small world. Can’t wait to tell my nieces that I’m from the same place as Spider-man.”

Peter watched as Agent Stacy gave her a disapproving look and Agent Watson shrugged as if to ask, what? They reminded him of himself and Wade. He wondered if they were like them.

“I’m Gwen,” Agent Stacy said to him. “We can keep calling you Spider-man, if you want, but—“

“Peter,” he said, because there was no one to protect anymore. “Peter Parker.”

The agents nodded, taking in the secret identity of the evidently famous Spider-man. “MJ,” said Agent Watson. “Gwen and I are, uh – well, we work together but we’re also, uh – in love. We’re a couple. Like a romantic, an in-love one. I hope that’s okay.”

Gwen blushed and rolled her eyes, but she looked fairly pleased. They reminded him even more of himself and Wade. “That’s okay,” he said, wondering why they cared what he thought. “Me, too.”

“Really?” Gwen said, her sweet face lighting up.

“One of the original Avengers was queer,” MJ said, laughing a little. “Well – is queer, I guess.”

Peter blinked. The agents were not shouting, but they weren’t exactly being quiet with the word “queer” on this very crowded train. No one was even paying attention to them. Maybe the future wasn’t all bad.

“Avengers?” Peter asked.

“That’s how people know you now,” Gwen explained. “You and Black Widow and the original Iron Man and Dr. Strange—“

“And Falcon and Wolverine and the Lizard,” MJ finished, looking somewhat self-conscious.

“If you count the Lizard,” Gwen added, then looked at Peter as if suddenly remembering herself. “Which you should, because he was definitely part of the team, right? He was your friend, Dr. Connors.”

Peter nodded. He didn’t think he was ready to know why Dr. Connors wasn’t necessarily counted as an original Avenger. He had no idea who “Falcon” and “Wolverine” were. He felt sick to his stomach.

By the time they’d found the place where his walk-up used to be and found the records office for his district, Peter’s nausea had only increased. He skin felt clammy and his hands shook.

“I’m sorry your house wasn’t there,” Gwen said to him as they waited for MJ to talk to the records office.

Peter shrugged – it hadn’t been much of a shock since the neighborhood looked nothing like his. It was more like everything was just gone, wiped away. MJ came out of the office then, her expression stricken.

“It wasn’t torn down until the ‘80s,” MJ said of his home. “But your aunt moved after the war, nice house up the Hudson a ways.”

Nat had promised him that May would be taken care of. Of course she’d kept her promise. He wondered if Nat had delivered the news herself. What could she have told May? What had May thought had happened to him? Of course she wouldn’t have wanted to keep living in their little walk-up in Queens – too many memories to endure by herself. He tried to picture her in a nice house, a big yard with a garden and a view of water.

“We can take you upstate,” MJ said. “SHIELD has cars—“

“No,” Peter said, swallowing. “I just want to go one more place.”

The cemetery hadn’t changed, even if the skyline and the area around it was completely different. It was as if one familiar thing, one place from his life had been dropped into the middle of this alien world. He found Ben’s grave easily – he and May and sometimes Wade had visited it often enough that he could have found it blind-folded. Next to Ben was another headstone, the ground it stood over covered in grass that had been growing for decades.

Peter knelt in front of the headstone. Hours ago, he had promised himself he would live, that he would survive fighting the Red Skull, so that he could go home to May. He would not break her heart again. He hadn’t even told her about Wade yet. Hours ago, minutes ago, he had held her face in his mind and remembered how much she loved him and how much he loved her and that they could get through anything together.

And now, hours later, here he was, alive, and she had lived another fifty years without him. Alone.

Peter placed one hand on May’s headstone, the other on Ben’s much older one, and let himself break. It didn’t matter that two women he’d just met were standing there. It didn’t matter that he was a grown man who’d fought Nazi scientists and their monsters. He wept, heart-broken. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried, probably in his panic over losing Wade, but even that grief had quickly turned inward and calcified, making him stony. Now it was as if all of that had crumbled away, all of the walls that held back his grief.

“I’m so sorry,” he heard Gwen say, and he could hear tears in her voice and feel that she had knelt close behind him. “I’m so sorry, Peter.”

It was kind, and he tried to pull himself together to thank her, but there was no way. He put his head between his knees and curled his arms around himself, like a kid, except no one he wanted could come to comfort him. He realized that after he’d lost Wade, what had felt like the worst thing that could possibly happen, he had still been with people who loved him and cared about him, who he trusted. Now, he was utterly alone, just like his poor love, lost in time, just like May, dying without knowing the truth. He tried desperately to remember what it felt like to have Wade’s big, sweet arms wrap around him, what it felt like when Ben and May both hugged him at once.

He felt a hand on his back, tentative, then two hands. Then one of them, Gwen he thought, laid her forehead against his shoulder blade.

“I have no idea how you feel,” he heard MJ say, close to him. “I can’t imagine what this must be like for you. But I know ice cream and movies can’t make it any worse.”

“You’re coming home with us,” Gwen said, her voice steady now. “Okay?”

Peter’s breath hitched as his sobs subsided. He shrugged – if that’s what they wanted, fine. He had nowhere else to go.


	9. Chapter 9

While Peter’s relationship with the future had been pretty rough so far, he could not fault it for its ice cream flavors. He had given up trying to understand what a “Cherry Garcia” was or why anyone would put salt in caramel and just randomly picked one of the ten pint-sized cartons that MJ had brought from the market.

“New York Super Chunk,” MJ pointed approvingly at his choice. “Also my favorite.”

He didn’t tell his hosts that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had ice cream because he didn’t want them to feel sorrier for him than they already did. No ice cream was just an unfortunate reality of living in the desert, but he also hadn’t been able to afford it much when he was a kid in Queens. He tried not to make over the shower too much, for the same reason. Yes, showers had been tepid and brief in the desert, but even when he was home in the States it hadn’t compared to this amazing future shower. He didn’t know how long he stood under the endless gallons of hot water, letting it pummel his sore, tired body.

_I’ll get you squeaky-clean, Webs—_

He heard Wade’s voice and felt Wade’s hands on him, wet and warm, touching him everywhere, covering him. He felt Wade’s lips working their way down his body, felt his own hand in Wade’s beautiful hair –

Peter shook himself. He hadn’t thought of Wade this much in months. Something about being so separated, so far away from the field and the war and his friends who needed him to focus—

MJ and Gwen owned every single movie about the Avengers that had been made since the Second World War, as it was now called. There were a lot of them. It seemed post-war American audiences had been ravenously hungry for cheap, patriotic tales of their national heroes’ adventures overseas.

“Pretty bad?” Gwen asked as she watched Peter watch an actor wearing a garish, flashy version of his Spider-man uniform pretend to fight a cape-wearing villain with what looked like a fish-bowl on his head.

“Wait ‘til you see what they did to Black Widow,” MJ said, shoveling ice cream into her mouth. “Hollywood was so fucking misogynist in the ‘50s.”

Peter wasn’t completely sure what “misogynist” meant but he made an audible sound of disgust when an actor wearing a short skirt with Nat’s insignia on it brought coffee to the rest of the Avengers.

“Bullshit, right?” MJ said, excited by his reaction. “I mean, I never got to meet her, but she was in fucking charge, right?”

“Yes,” Peter said, grimacing as the actor who was supposed to be Howard grabbed Black Widow forcefully by the shoulders and kissed her.

“Did that happen, though?” Gwen asked, referring to the dreadful kiss on screen.

“I mean, they messed around, sure,” Peter said, “but not – not like that. Nat’s the Boss.”

Was the Boss. Nat had been dead for ten years. Nat who he’d made up with only hours ago after what now seemed like a silly fight.

“Was she bi?” MJ asked, leaning over the edge of the couch towards Peter. “I heard she was bi.”

“Did she also like girls?” Gwen clarified.

Peter nodded and couldn’t help smiling when both women cackled with triumphant laughter.

“Who else?” MJ asked. “Or, I mean, is it okay to ask you stuff like this?”

“It’s okay,” Peter said. He was watching a movie about himself and he’d traveled seventy years in time – nothing felt real, so he might as well make them happy. “Dr. Strange and Wong were a couple, and I haven’t even seen Wong in this movie.”

“Because he was Asian,” Gwen pointed at the screen, accusingly. “They cut Asian characters out of so many movies in the 50s and 60s.”

Ah. They may have other words for it in the future, but Peter knew about white folks treating other people like they were less than human. The thought that all of them had been idolized while Wong had been forgotten made his blood boil. It was made worse when he realized that the Avenger with giant metal wings was supposed to be Sam.

“I hope you both know,” Peter said, trying to control his temper, “that Sam Wilson was a black man.”

MJ and Gwen both nodded, solemnly. “They’re better about that in the more recent movies,” Gwen assured him. “I mean, they don’t mention that Wong and Dr. Strange were in love, but—“

That reminded Peter of another member of their team who he hadn’t seen on screen yet. “Is, um – is there an Avenger called Wade?”

Gwen audibly gasped. “Your best friend, the one who was – who you lost? He’s not in many of these old movies, but he was a major character in the TV series.”

“Was he—were you, um,” MJ stammered, looking eager but unsure if she was overstepping.

Peter nodded, swallowing. “We were like you, the two of you.”

“I knew it,” MJ said under her breath. Gwen elbowed her.

“It must be so weird,” Gwen said, apologetically, “to talk to us about your life when we know it as this story we grew up with.”

Peter shrugged. “I appreciate you trying to help me.”

Because that’s what they were trying to do. It wasn’t their fault that there was no way to help him.

MJ stopped the awful 1950s movie and started another that she said was the most recent version. Peter added the fact that people could collect movies and watch them in their homes to the pile of things that he couldn’t quite process. He came to understand that “Wolverine” and “Falcon” were code-names that Logan and Sam had used after he’d disappeared from their lives. The movie also depicted a giant green man fighting with them in the desert, helping to rescue the Dirty Thirteen. Everything about it was so removed from his actual life that Peter was able to watch it perfectly detached, enjoying his ice cream.

MJ and Gwen made a place for him to sleep on their couch, complete with proper pillows and a blanket despite Peter’s insistence that he didn’t need such things. He couldn’t help but watch them work together, notice their little touches and soft glances – they were so different from each other in personality, but he could see how very much they loved each other. He was happy for them, but it made his heart hurt.

_You’re gonna be famous, Petey._

He lay on the couch, staring into the dark, thinking of Wade. He tried to remember how it felt to have his big man’s long body pressed against his side, what the weight of his arm felt like over Peter’s waist.

“I’m gonna go to college, I’m gonna be famous,” Peter teased, turning his head to kiss Wade’s stubbly jaw. “You’ve got high expectations, mister.”

“I’m serious,” Wade said, pulling him closer to his chest. “They’re gonna sing songs about you, Spider-man. Little kids’ll fight over who gets to be you when they play pretend.”

Peter held Wade’s hand where it rested on his chest, thumb stroking over his calloused knuckles. “What about you?”

“Me?” Wade kissed Peter behind his ear. “I’ll be remembered as your trusty side-kick, ready and willing to obey your every whim.”

Peter had laughed at the ridiculousness of that idea, and they had indulged in some whims that night, as he recalled. Now he lay on a strange couch far in the future, famous, and Wade was a blip next to him in people’s minds. Howard’s son had said that his father and Nat had never stopped looking for Peter – why had they apparently stopped looking for Wade? Or had they? The dossiers had made it sound like some of his friends, who people now called the original Avengers for some reason, could still be alive but were hidden. What if they had somehow found Wade but kept it a secret?

Peter tried to squash the little flicker of hope that he felt in his chest. It would only exist to hurt him, to break his heart even more.

*~*~*

“Did Howard’s son say that you had a message from Dr. Strange?”

“Tony? Yeah,” Gwen said as she helped him pour coffee out of an odd little contraption. “We have a recorded message from Stephen Strange.”

“It was made in 1968,” MJ added, sliding Peter a plate with what looked like two big iced crackers. “That was where Mysterio ended up when he zapped you two. Strange recorded it and put it in SHIELD priority archives, said to not open it until 2016.”

“It was a hell of a New Year’s party,” Gwen said, “cracking open that film canister.”

Peter sipped his coffee, grateful that it tasted just as good if not better than he was used to. “Do you think if we went back to your headquarters that I could see it?”

“We’ll go as soon as you’re ready,” MJ said, munching on her own giant iced cracker as she opened their giant refrigerator. Everything in the future was huge. “Do you need something to eat besides Pop Tarts? We have, uh – toast?”

Pop Tarts were impossibly sweet, warm, gooey, and tasted disgustingly of strawberry. Peter loved them. MJ and Gwen were delighted and coerced him into eating two more before they left to catch the train.

When they arrived at Avengers HQ (because there were evidently new Avengers, hence Peter’s friends being referred to as the “originals”) they found Tony Stark in a worse mood than when Peter had stormed out the day before. Peter understood his frustration, but he also had to tamp down the urge to lecture Tony about his attitude. Tony was his friend’s kid, after all, and Peter didn’t think Howard would want his kid to be a spoiled brat. But then Peter wasn’t sure what kind of father Howard had been – maybe the kid came by it fair and square.

“Can you tolerate watching it on the screen,” Tony asked him, “or do you need a frame-by-frame print out?”

“Just start the film, Tony,” Gwen said, averting the sharp retort on Peter’s tongue. Tony frowned and hit three places on a console, which made a crystal clear image pop up in front of them.

Dr. Strange, who Peter had seen only the day before, was visibly older. His hair had gone almost completely gray, and his eyes were lined, not just from age but from constant worrying. Peter listened to his friend’s slightly lower and rougher voice say he’d recently discovered that Spider-man had been thrown into the year 2016. He gave no explanation of how he knew, and Peter could hear the sounds of battle wherever Dr. Strange was when he made this recording. Strange said for SHIELD to be prepared to receive him, to have some kind of temporal-focusing device ready.

“Make sure he understands that he cannot go back to 1945,” Dr. Strange said. “These monsters have already done tremendous damage to the fabric of time, and if he tries to reverse his trajectory, he’ll most likely rip a hole in existence. Just – he has to keep moving forward, make sure he understands.”

The emotion in his friend’s usually-stoic voice and face made Peter’s chest ache.

“Tell Spider-man,” Dr. Strange continued, the sounds of battle growing louder behind him, “tell him I’m so very sorry.”

The recording went dark. Tony pressed a spot on the console again and the screen disappeared. No one spoke for a moment.

“That’s all there is,” Tony said, shortly. “Sorry.”

Peter shook his head. His own position made a little more sense now, but Dr. Strange had said nothing about Wade. He realized that he had been functioning in this alien world because his brain had decided that it wasn’t real – after his break down at Ben and May’s gravesite, some sort of defense mechanism had kicked in that allowed him to exist here without letting it hurt him every moment. Seeing Dr. Strange, older, warning him that he couldn’t come back, had shattered all of his defenses.

“What about --,” he began, not sure what it was he wanted, “did Nat keep notes? Did your dad have a diary or somewhere that they wrote down what they found out when they were looking for me?”

“I’m sorry, did you not hear the wizard that just told us you need to look forward instead of backward?” Tony asked. “We need you here, in the present, where HYDRA is about to show up again and kill more people.”

“He doesn’t owe us anything,” MJ said in a low voice. “Everyone he knows is dead and his friends have all been white-washed out of movies, give him a break.”

“Where are the Avengers?” Peter asked, gesturing to the ostentatious “A” visible outside of the building. “Are you an Avenger?”

“I happen to be the leader of the Avengers,” Tony said, crossing his arms.

MJ and Gwen gave him twin incredulous looks.

“Captain Danvers and I share leadership duties, fine,” Tony admitted, “but yes, and the Avengers are currently all over the world trying to repair the damage done last time Red Skull and Mysterio showed up and kicked our asses.”

“All over the world?” Peter repeated. “How?”

“They have very sophisticated teleportation technology,” Gwen explained. “They can be in London one minute, and you think you’re beating them back and realize you’re fighting some kind of illusion and they’ve actually jumped to Busan.”

“So it’s just one group?” Peter asked.

“Of super-powered, brain-washed monsters who you can’t wound,” Tony corrected. “I blew off Sabretooth’s arm in Buenos Aires, and by the time we chased them here he’d grown it back.”

Peter thought of Wade’s burned skin and Logan’s broken leg. How much had Red Skull developed his self-healing formula in the intervening decades?

“I want to look in your archives,” Peter said, staring Tony down. He’d done it to his old man plenty of times, and he wasn’t about to give in to a Stark temper-tantrum now. “Maybe I’ll see something you missed, something that’ll help.”

Tony looked unconvinced and frustrated, but threw up his hands. He took Peter down to the basement of the tall building (Peter had to resist the urge to cling to the wall through the entire terrifying elevator ride) and gestured at a large room with shelves and shelves full of files, telling him to have at it.

Instead of discouraged, as Tony had probably hoped he would be, Peter was invigorated. Being able to dig into box after box of information made him feel like he could breathe, like there wasn’t a foot bearing down on his throat anymore. He worked for hours, occasionally visited by Gwen or MJ who brought him coffee and even some more Pop Tarts.

But eventually his enthusiasm started to wane so much that even sugary fake-strawberry flavor couldn’t help it. He was running out of files from Nat and Howard’s search for him, even starting to run low on their files related to Mysterio and Red Skull. He had seen nothing about Wade, not even a mention.

He had found out why Dr. Connors was only partly considered an Avenger, however. He’d read that in the 1960s his friend had a mental collapse, almost certainly because he was increasing his enhancements as their fight against Red Skull grew more desperate. He betrayed and fought against the other Avengers for a while, and when he’d come back to his senses, his guilt made him reckless and he’d taken a stupid risk that got him killed. If Peter had been there, would he have been able to talk him down? Had Nat and Howard been so consumed with the search for him that they neglected Dr. Connors, neglected Wade?

He was fighting the anger growing in his chest when MJ appeared, this time with a worried expression.

“Gwen and Tony and I have to go,” she said, trying to smile. “Agent Brant knows you’re down here, I’ve told her to check on you—“

“Is it the Red Skull?” Peter asked, and he could tell by the change in her face that it was. “Are they in the city?”

“No, thank god,” MJ said. “Jersey for some reason, this old military base.”

Peter’s stomach turned over. “Where in Jersey?”

*~*~*

“You know,” Tony said, holding up Peter’s Spider-man uniform, “I can update this for you.”

Peter snatched the uniform out of his hands. “No, thanks.”

“So you were stationed here?” Gwen asked. “Was it an SSR base?”

Peter tried to think as he simultaneously tried not to look out the front window of the jet. It was amazingly quiet, but also faster than anything he’d ever ridden in, and he was really hoping they weren’t planning to jump out of it.

“It might have been,” he said. “The guys in my platoon were all being considered for the super soldier program.”

He slipped to the back of the jet to get into his uniform, wishing he’d taken a moment to change at Avenger’s HQ, but the agents and Tony weren’t paying attention to him. They were going over what they knew about Red Skull, trying to figure out why he would be at an old SSR base. Peter hated not knowing more, being so behind – the day before, he was one of a handful of people who knew everything there was to know about HYDRA. Now he’d missed over seventy years.

They landed the jet awfully close to the base, but Tony assured him that they were in “stealth mode.” They had no plan but to enter the base carefully – there wasn’t a big force here, and they weren’t making a lot of noise. The only way they’d known Red Skull would be at this location was that they’d picked up his “energy signature” on their magical future radar. Tony really hated Peter referring to things as magical, so he’d been using the term as much as possible, especially about Tony’s armor, a much flashier-looking version of Howard’s.

“Movement in the armory,” MJ said through the earpiece they’d given him. “To the north-east.”

Peter moved in the direction of the armory, mostly going on his memories which were sadly sparse considering he’d live at this place only two years ago, from his perspective anyway. Once he saw the building, his suspicions were confirmed – the top floor was the armory, but the basement had been Dr. Connors’ lab where Peter and the other super soldier candidates had come for regular check-ups. He radioed his team to warn them about the lab as the four of them approached the building from different angles, and he was fiercely reminded of sneaking up on buildings in little desert towns with his real team, with Nat, with Wade.

His hair standing on end interrupted his stroll down memory lane.

“Somebody’s here,” he radioed. Seconds later someone started firing at them from the general direct of the armory.

“Sniper,” Tony said, and Peter could hear him overhead as he suddenly swooped down and laid a line of fire in the trees surrounding the building. This base hadn’t been used in decades, and the forest had partially taken it back. Peter heard returning fire and could now tell exactly where the sniper was positioned, though he didn’t agree with Tony that this was a sniper – a sniper would have killed them; this person was distracting them.

Peter got into the trees and started swinging towards the gunman’s position as quickly and quietly as he could. When he spotted the person, up high in a tree just over the armory’s roof, his heart stopped. The gunman was wearing a mask, red with black markings. The uniform looked familiar, too – red, deep red.

“I got him,” Peter snarled into the radio.

“Peter, that’s Deadpool,” Gwen radioed. “He’s their best, don’t take him alone—“

Deadpool. The asshole who’d killed Howard and his wife, Maria, who Peter hadn’t had the chance to meet. Even better.

The gunmen was watching the sky, trying to get a shot at Tony, and so was completely caught off guard when Peter swung into him, knocking him out of the tree so that he landed with a thud that would have broken a normal human’s spine.

But these guys were enhanced, Peter knew. HYDRA super soldiers. A HYDRA super soldier wearing Wade’s colors, Wade’s markings. Peter landed right on top of the guy as he was trying to get to his feet and started punching.

“Do you know whose uniform you’re wearing, you bastard?” Peter demanded as he landed hit after hit, not letting the asshole get his breath. “Do you?”

“Pretty sure it’s mine,” the gunman said as he finally struggled to his feet. “Holy shit, where’d they dig you up?”

Peter’s fist froze in the air, and it gave the gunman a chance to punch him in the stomach, knocking the air out of him. He scrambled after he gunman, who was firing both of the big guns he held up towards Tony’s armor, laughing manically and loudly calling Tony “Iron Dick” as he did so.

That voice.

Peter barreled into the masked gunman as hard as he could, knocking him backwards through the door of the armory. He fleetingly observed that a huge bolt locking the building had been busted open.

“Listen, Webs,” said the gunman as Peter wrestled him for control of the guns, “I’m not here for you, so be a smart little arachnid and fuck off, okay?”

His voice. Peter gave up trying to get the guns – he was too distracted by Peter’s assault to use them anyway – and started clawing at the mask.

“Hey!” the gunman yelled, pulling his head back so quickly that he overbalanced them, sending them crashing down a flight of wooden stairs and into a small room. Peter tumbled over the gunman’s head, tried to right himself, and got kicked in the chest. He picked the gunman up off of the ground, causing him to let out an indignant shriek, and threw him against the wall. The guy’s body broke straight through the rotting wood wall, which caused a support beam to collapse, revealing Dr. Connor’s old lab.

Peter ignored the lab, ignored his spider sense telling him there was someone else here, and dove straight for the masked assassin. The man fired at him, blowing yet another hole in one of the wooden walls, but Peter dodged it easily, feinting to the man’s right and getting a hold on the mask with his left hand. He pulled as hard as he could and the mask gave way.

It was – it was awful. It was like he’d been burned but the skin hadn’t healed. His entire head was covered in scarred, ridged skin but also open wounds and sores. The guy looked shocked and enraged, but Peter could only look at his eyes. They were bright blue.

A low, mocking laughter filled the stale air of the lab. Red Skull had not been there before, Peter could swear, but there he was, standing on one of the old metal tables. He looked exactly as Peter remembered.

“I told you, Spider-man,” the magician laughed. “You should have asked me what I did with him. I’ve waited so long to show you.”

The gunman, Deadpool, looked around at Red Skull, his expression angry and confused. Peter couldn’t feel his legs.

“You hurt us that day,” Red Skull admitted, his smile almost manic. “It took me weeks to recover, and we lost decades of progress without Mysterio. But now we’ve made up the time, no small thanks to your friend.”

“Wade,” Peter heard himself say. The gunman, Deadpool, turned to him, and if Peter hadn’t believed it before it was undeniable now. Wade looked at him as if he was a ghost, as if he’d somehow shaken him to the core just by saying his name. Peter pulled off his own mask, and the blue eyes went wide, but Wade didn’t say anything, didn’t come to him.

“Ah, the face of an American hero,” Red Skull sneered. “Agent Wilson, do you know this man?”

“What the fuck is this?” Deadpool demanded, turning on Red Skull. “You told me I was here to kill the Iron Giant.”

As if on cue, Tony suddenly crashed through what was left of the roof. He fired at Wade, and Peter screamed as he watched the man’s entire arm tear from his body.

“Ah, goddamnit,” Deadpool groused before using the gun in his other arm to fire at Tony. Peter lunged for him, trying to tackle Wade to the ground, but Red Skull was suddenly in front of him – he was impossibly huge, three times the size he should have been.

“I am not here, Spider-man,” he said, looming over Peter, “I just wanted you to see, and now you have. Perhaps it is small of me, but now I can die happy.”

As quickly as he’d appeared, the Red Skull was gone. He hadn’t been there at all. Peter looked up at Deadpool, looked right into his beautiful blue eyes. He looked troubled, disturbed, but not like he knew him, not like he loved him.

“Wade,” he said again, desperately. He thought Deadpool was going to speak, but another volley of fire from Tony and the man punched at a device on his belt with his remaining arm and was gone. It was not unlike watching Red Skull point a wand at him, making him disappear.

“Spider-man!”

Peter turned to see Gwen and MJ picking through the wrecked lab. Tony had landed and lifted his face shield. Peter felt a rush of irrational hatred toward him, but Tony had only been trying to kill the man who’d killed his parents, who’d ruined his life.

“Are you all right?” Gwen asked. “Was it just Red Skull and Deadpool?”

“Why were they here?” MJ said, looking around, astonished. “What did they say?”

“They were here for me,” Peter said, and his own voice sounded as if it came from far away. “They wanted to show me –“

He couldn’t make his voice work anymore. He could see the others looking at each other and at him in his peripheral vision, but all he could do was stare at the spot where Wade had disappeared.

Not Wade. Deadpool. An assassin who didn’t know who Peter was.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here it is, the last chapter! 
> 
> The opening scene is inspired by Bexorz -- you all should go visit their tumblr to see lovely lovely arts: bexalizard.tumblr.com
> 
> You should also visit SpaceTrash(DesolateHappiness) on tumblr for beautiful arts: mrs-dr-strange.tumblr.com
> 
> Enjoy!

“How easy is this stuff to make?”

Peter looked up from the unconscious HYDRA agent he had just bound with web to see Wade fingering the stretchy, strong material. “Pretty easy – why?”

“I mean, does it all need to go toward the war effort or can it be used for, uh – recreational purposes?”

Even though he was wearing his red and black mask, Peter thought he could see Wade’s impish grin. Peter had him wrapped in web and suspended upside-down so fast that he let out a hilarious little squeal of laughter.

“I think entertaining a hard-working soldier counts as part of the war effort,” Peter said before rolling up his mask, peeling Wade’s down over his mouth, and kissing him. Upside-down kissing wouldn’t be his favorite, but it was fun for the moment. Seeing Wade off-balance was always fun, the way he fell apart under Peter’s touch, eager and vulnerable.

“Now, let’s see,” Peter muttered, pulling the end of the webbing to adjust Wade to the perfect height, the front zipper of his uniform right at the level of Peter’s mouth. He heard Wade swear and sigh as he worked the zipper open, freeing Wade’s cock, nuzzling it with his nose, teasing.

“Baby, I’ve got an eyeful down here, but I’d love a mouthful.”

Peter giggled, looking down at where Wade was desperately trying to get contact with his crotch. He took pity on him, opening the front of his own uniform and pulling his half-erect cock out of his shorts. Wade moaned gratefully as Peter pumped himself to fullness and then guided his cock into Wade’s open mouth. He kept one hand cradling Wade’s head and held Wade’s hip with the other, rocking him forward so that Peter could take his cock into his own mouth. It wasn’t an easy position by any means, but the feeling of Wade moaning around him was worth it.

Getting a rhythm going was awkward, and they had a couple of laughing fits, but it was okay – they both came hard and ended up in a pile together, wrapped in each other, giggling and in love. They always had fun together, no matter what, and they always would.

Peter hadn’t thought of that morning in months. It had only happened about a year ago for him, while they were helping out near Tripoli. It seemed like another life.

*~*~*

MJ and Gwen dug up everything that SHIELD had about Deadpool and brought it to him. He sat in Avengers HQ for another several hours reading files and field notes, this time finding exactly what he was looking for and almost wishing he hadn’t. Nat and Howard had not neglected Wade – they’d realized early that this assassin was or used to be their friend, and they wanted to keep it an absolute secret. Peter could feel their anguish in their notes.

No one seemed to quite understand how Wade had gotten involved in the Weapon X project. He couldn’t have been displaced too far in time, because by the mid-1960s Deadpool was making kills, terrorizing SHIELD. By 1968, they knew that the Weapon X subjects had been tortured, exposed to extreme conditions to force mutations, and injected with a version of the serum that Red Skull had been developing at the fortress.

Deadpool, the notes said, was severely scarred as a side-effect of his mutation, and his healing factor had somehow conflicted with the cancer inside of him to make it so that his body, including his skin, was constantly regenerating itself. As a result, his appearance was shocking and he most likely experienced chronic pain. The Weapon X process had also wiped or warped his memories leaving it impossible to trace his origins – so the official SHIELD file said. He was responsible for the deaths of hundreds, SHIELD agents and others, including Howard Stark.

When Dr. Strange had said in the recording that he was “so very sorry,” Peter had assumed he meant that he was sorry Peter had been displaced in time and couldn’t come home. He now realized that his friend had meant he was so very sorry about what had happened to Wade.

As Peter was staring at the Weapon X files sitting on the table, the last person he expected sat down next to him. He hadn’t seen or spoken to Tony since they’d arrived back at HQ. He’d assumed the man wouldn’t want to have anything to do with him now.

“Do you know what I got for Christmas every single year when I was a kid?”

When Peter just looked at him, puzzled, Tony smiled. “Spider-man pajamas. Every year since I can remember until I was, I dunno, fourteen or so, and even then I got Spidey gear. You were my favorite. Every Halloween, Spider-man. Except for that one year I went as Kermit the Frog.”

Tony laughed until he realized that Peter had no idea who Kermit the Frog was. “The point is,” he said, “I had this idea of you, growing up, that had nothing to do with you-you, actual you, the human. You were this person my dad never shut up about and all the adults around me loved so much, and they’d all tell stories about you and how amazing and spectacular you were. So in my head, you were this guy who could beat anybody. Do anything. You were why I wanted to be a scientist.”

Peter looked down at his hands, his incredibly strong hands, so uselessly sitting in his lap. “Tony, I’m nobody special,” he sighed. “The only reason I’m here is because Nat liked me, and that was just because I’m an angry little shit like her.”

“Yeah, she liked to talk about that,” Tony laughed, eyes turning sad. Peter suddenly felt very close to him – they loved many of the same people. “What I’m saying is, I had a lot of expectations about you when you came through that portal, and that wasn’t fair to you, and I’m sorry.”

Tony moved to stand, but Peter put a hand on his arm. “I’m so sorry that Wade did that to your parents,” he said. “I can’t believe he – Howard was our friend, Wade would have taken a bullet for him.”

 “Yeah,” Tony said, grimly, “but that was your Wade. This guy, Deadpool – he’s not him. All the Weapon X subjects, they’re animals, they’re brainwashed.”

Peter thought about the fact that Howard had known Deadpool was Wade, that it was possible he knew it was his friend killing him and his wife. He wondered if he had tried to call to him, to make him remember, just like Peter had done. Had he gotten the same disturbed but unknowing look in response?

“Is there any chance,” he said, “that you would let me take him? Away, where he can’t hurt anyone? I’d be responsible—“

Tony looked sympathetic but he shook his head. “No. Sorry. If we can take him alive, he’ll go into SHIELD custody, but none of us are going to be too worried about taking these guys alive. You get that, right?”

Peter nodded. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I can’t do more, for you.”

“Well,” Tony said, making a visible effort to brighten, “you are a brilliant scientist with the proportional strength and agility of a spider. I’d say there’s plenty you could do, if you’re up for it.”

“Your dad and Doc Connors were the scientists,” Peter sighed. “Now, if we could somehow find one of the sorcerers—“

“Did you really make your web fluid in a tent on an army base in the desert just using what was lying around?”

Peter blinked at him. Tony smirked. “Yeah, you’re a brilliant scientist. And not to toot my own horn, but I bet my set up will make my dad’s lab look like a Chuck E Cheese.”

Tony was clearly disappointed that Peter did not know what a Chuck E Cheese was, but he was right – Tony’s lab put Howard’s to shame. Peter was pretty sure he’d be absolutely no help as he didn’t recognize most of the equipment.

“I think our priority is Mysterio,” Tony explained. “That creepy fucker can mess with our brains, and if we can at least be sure we’re actually dealing with the people we’re seeing and not just illusions, it’ll go a long way toward taking care of this shit once and for all.”

Peter couldn’t disagree – Mysterio had been the rogue element the entire time he had been fighting Red Skull. He did his best to help Tony, who seemed pleased with the information he was able to give him. Peter supposed that made sense – less than a week ago, from his perspective, he’d been working with the sorcerers to analyze the equipment they’d found at the desert fortress. He realized, as he did what he could to help Tony with the molecular de-stabilizer he was building, that he’d been desperately keeping himself from thinking about Wade then, too.

Work ran out, like it always did. Tony said even he needed to sleep for a few hours and urged Peter to go home with Gwen and MJ again. Peter went back to the Weapon X files.

Torture. Mutilation. Vivisection. They had made attempts to clone the more successful cases, even used DNA that they’d collected from Logan to try to replicate his healing-factor. There were about ten Weapon X operatives active now, that they knew of, all with similar abilities, only a few with substantial files. Brainwashed animals, all able to heal themselves from even mortal wounds. He wondered if Wade was holed up somewhere now, growing back the arm Tony had blown off.

In Deadpool’s file there were mostly pictures, the familiar mask and the tall, muscular body in various places around the world. They had images of him with his team of HYDRA super soldiers as well as blurry images of him stalking a victim, watching SHIELD as they tried to watch him. Peter read through the accounts of various agents who’d encountered Deadpool over the years – it all sounded like Wade, the efficiency, the violence. He was even known for cracking wise in the middle of fights.

 _That was your Wade,_ Tony had said. He wasn’t wrong. Peter couldn’t remember any other moment in his life when Wade had looked at him like that, like Peter didn’t mean anything to him. He couldn’t remember not knowing Wade. He couldn’t remember not loving Wade. He’d only spent about twenty months of his life total without Wade close to him, taking care of him. Years of scraped knees and hurt feelings and pain so deep he couldn’t process it, and Wade had been with him for nearly everything.

Wade, on the other hand, had been alone even when they were kids because of his monster of a father. Now he’d been alone and helpless at the hands of more monsters who’d hurt him so badly he wasn’t himself anymore.

He sensed MJ come out onto the balcony. She sidled up next to him and held out a cigarette. Peter shook his head.

“I thought everybody smoked in the forties,” she said, lighting up.

“They did, I just never had a taste for it,” Peter shared. He tried not to think of the last time he’d let Wade catch him with a cigarette, the fun and sweetness of their little games.

“What will my options be,” Peter asked her, “after this is over?”

“Whatever you want,” MJ replied. “SHIELD can help you with money and stuff, but you’ll be free to go live your life, go back to school, disappear— well, not disappear.“

Peter raised an eyebrow at her. “SHIELD won’t keep you in custody or in, like, indentured servitude,” MJ explained, “but we will keep track of you. We keep track of all enhanced persons.”

They were quiet for a moment, both looking out at the city. “It’s really him?” MJ asked.

Peter shivered, reminded of Nat asking him the same question while they sat in a Jeep. But then, Peter had been so happy he could hardly believe it. Now, he just nodded.

“Jesus,” MJ sighed. “How can one person have such shitty luck?”

Peter couldn’t help but laugh. MJ seemed a little horrified at herself, but she laughed, too. They were so amused at themselves that they didn’t hear another person join them on the balcony.

“What the hell is that?”

Gwen popped MJ on the ass with her open palm, nearly making her drop her cigarette. “I thought you threw those away,” she groused at her girlfriend before handing Peter yet another file folder. “New intel – based on their pattern, we think they’ll show back up tomorrow in the city.”

“What’s our plan?” Peter asked.

“Fight,” Gwen shrugged. “Some of the other Avengers can maybe make it back in time, and hopefully what you and Tony have been working on will give us an edge. At least we know they’re coming, right?”

She looked to MJ for support, but MJ was still blushing furiously. “You just hit me on the ass in front of Spider-man.”

“Sorry,” Gwen said, more to Peter than MJ, “it’s the sleep deprivation.”

Peter watched MJ subtly lean her shoulder against Gwen’s. They once again made his heart hurt, not only because of who they reminded him of, but because they both looked incredibly tired. He couldn’t help feeling like it was his fault – they had been so kind to him, and he could do so little to help them.

Dr. Strange had told him to move forward, but what would it have been like if he hadn’t left them when he did? Would they have been able to stop Red Skull before he hurt so many more people? What would it have been like for Tony if he hadn’t been the amazing Spider-man but just his Uncle Peter? Would Howard have been killed if he’d been around, helping them so that they weren’t all spread so thin? If he had been there, would they have found Wade in time to stop what had been done to him? Would he and Peter have been able to live out at least part of their lives together and die with ten grandkids, like Sam?

Peter looked at MJ and Gwen. They were exhausted, but not beat. He couldn’t fix anything that had happened during the time he’d missed. His heart broke even as he thought it, but he couldn’t fix Wade – Wade’s entire life had been ruined by bullies. The best thing Peter could do for him, for these brave women with him now, was to finally end the biggest bully he knew.

“Are either of you, uh – acrobatic at all?”

The couple looked at him, quizzically. “I was a gymnast,” Gwen said, “and I’m pretty good hand-to-hand.”

“She’s an expert in martial arts,” MJ corrected. “Not me – I just shoot things.”

“Would you say we’re about the same size?”

Gwen blinked at him as he lined himself up with her, trying to gauge their relative height. “Uh – yeah? Ish?”

Illusions were the advantage that Red Skull and Mysterio had for so long. They could create illusions, too.

“It’s a good plan,” MJ agreed later when the four of them were gathered in the lab. “Dangerous, but –“

“I can do it,” Gwen said, looking at Peter. “I can. You’ll, like, teach me some stuff, right?”

“Sure I will,” Peter reassured, once again struck with déjà vu, “And you don’t have to keep it up for long, just enough time for me to get the drop on him.”

Peter couldn’t tell what Tony thought, which was weird enough in itself, but he didn’t protest. Hours later, after Peter had trained with Gwen for a while and then told her the best thing she could do to prepare was get some sleep, Tony found him in the lab.

“I think you should still have these.”

He held out two giant cuffs. They were familiar but had the clean, subtle lines of all of Tony’s technology. “Are these—“

“Web shooters,” Tony answered, putting them in Peter’s hands. “Based on your design. Dad said you re-engineered his the minute he gave them to you, so.”

Peter put them on as Tony bounced on his heels, hands in his pockets, very obviously trying not to look anxious. “They’re perfect,” Peter said. “Thank you.”

Tony shrugged, barely hiding his pleased smile. “Just threw ‘em together, thought they’d come in handy since Gwen’ll have your steam-punk versions.”

Peter did not know what steam-punk was, but he laid a hand on his new friend’s shoulder. “You’re a good kid, Tony. I’m sorry I missed, um – your whole life.”

“Not all of it,” Tony said, optimistically. “You may save my ass tomorrow. All of our asses.”

Peter hoped so. It was a good plan, but as he lay on a couch in the lab trying to sleep, he couldn’t stop thinking of what could go wrong.

The next day, when the energy signature that meant Red Skull showed up on Tony’s monitors, it was slightly outside of the city, an industrial area. They were all grateful – they had city officials on alert for evacuation, but this would make things easier.

“He’s probably picked this spot because it’s good for opening lots of creepy time and dimension portals,” Tony warned, “but our doo-dad should keep those from working.”

“There’s not a lot of places to hide,” MJ said, casting a worried look at Gwen. Peter’s throat felt tight – if he got Gwen killed today, if he took her from MJ, he wouldn’t be able to live with himself.

They landed in stealth mode, once again only the four of them. Other Avengers were making their way from other parts of the world, but there was no telling how many Weapon X operatives would get there before their back-up arrived.

Peter stayed on the jet. It was crucial that he be out of sight until Red Skull saw Gwen, but it took all of his will power not to go with his friends. He stood, watching the monitors, until MJ finally radioed him.

“Go,” she said, simply. Peter put on the black army-style cap that was part of the SHIELD uniform he’d been given and left the jet, running towards the heat of the fight. He didn’t dare use his webs yet.

He could see Gwen fighting two figures, one of them firing a gun at her. She was keeping her distance, just like he’d taught her, liberally using her webbing so that her lack of super-human strength wouldn’t be as apparent. Luckily, she was small and fast, and in his Spider-man uniform, she looked very convincing to Peter.

But the important thing was that she looked convincing to Red Skull. Just as Peter had predicted, the Nazi was perched on the highest point of the electrical plant they were fighting around, not watching Tony take on about six Weapon X agents, certainly the loudest fight going on, but watching Gwen, thinking she was Peter. Spider-man was the loose end he wanted to tie up today.

As he made his way stealthily up the scaffolding Red Skull was perched on, Peter scanned the battle. He could see now that one of the figures Gwen was dealing with was Deadpool – he was firing at her relentlessly, and she was dodging him, for now. Half of his attention was on MJ, who had found good cover and was firing at Deadpool and two other Weapon X agents. She was saving Gwen’s life, but Peter hoped they wouldn’t have to keep it up for long.

Peter held his breath as he pulled himself up and over the highest railing of the scaffold, across the platform from where Red Skull stood, watching the fight. He had probably fantasized about this moment for years, assuming that Peter wouldn’t have the will to fight back now that he knew the truth. Peter focused on the Skull’s back as he set his feet silently on the platform, and he thought of Red Skull ordering Deadpool to stick to Spider-man, to make sure he was the one who killed him. Dark hatred curled in his stomach as he shot web from both wrists, straight at his target.

Even taken by surprise, Red Skull was a formidable fighter. It took him a moment, as he struggled against the webbing, to realize what had happened, that he’d been fooled. Peter jerked the webbing towards himself with all of his strength, using the momentum to kick the Skull hard in the face. He recovered, still caught in the web but strong enough to land a hard hit, knocking the air out of Peter’s lungs. They traded blows, throwing each other across the platform, each of them coming precariously close to the metal railing.

Finally, Peter got his enemy pinned face down, his knees pressing into the Skull’s leather-clad back.

“Do you ever get that feeling,” Peter panted, pushing his enemy’s face into the concrete, “like this has all happened before?”

The Red Skull cackled. Peter felt a presence behind him.

“Peter –“

Shit. Peter had been prepared for something like this, but it wasn’t pleasant. “Fuck off, Mysterio,” he shouted, pulling Red Skull to his feet and turning them around, holding the Nazi magician in front of him.

There was Wade, young and beautiful, skin unmarred and head full of thick, blonde hair. He looked hurt and sad. “Peter, why did you let them get me?” Wade asked.

Peter swallowed. “The eyes are wrong,” he said, happy to hear that his voice was steady. “Of all days to not pay attention to detail, honestly.”

Almost as if on cue, Tony’s de-stabilizer began working. Peter still wasn’t clear on all of the tech, but he watched the image of Wade distort and glitch, then tear apart. Again – not pleasant. It made the hatred in his stomach burn and grow. Good.

“No more illusions, I see,” Red Skull laughed, low and throaty. Peter looked around, reaching out with his spider senses to find Mysterio, but a thick smoke had begun to creep across the platform. He looked down at the battle below and saw the same thick smoke spreading across the ground.

Shit.

His spine tingled a second before Mysterio lunged for him in the smoke, and he pivoted, throwing Red Skull toward his partner as hard as he could, keeping hold of the web. It sent them both toward the railing but not over it as he’d hoped. They were on him again in a moment, but his senses gave him an advantage – for now. They couldn’t match his strength, but they were strong. Peter had not meant to fight both of them at once today.

When he’d managed to send them flying in opposite directions, Peter looked up to see more SHIELD jets landing. Not only that, but a figure was cutting through the air, a blur of blue and red and yellow. The other Avengers, Captain Danvers – they were here. They would help with the other Weapon X agents, and Peter had the two worst villains well occupied. If he could just survive a little longer, he could give his friends a chance to end this today.

They were both on him again. Because of Tony’s machine, they weren’t able to use their magic well – no sending Peter or themselves through time again – but they fought as if it was the last thing they were going to do. Peter kept thinking he had nothing left, then found he did, thrilling every time he was able to land another hard hit, to throw them off of him. If he could just get one of them webbed and chuck them over the side, off the high scaffold, it might be enough –

Mysterio caught him in the jaw and his vision went white. He bounced back fast, but he could hear Red Skull’s terrible laughter – they were tiring him out. Maybe this had been their plan all along, to sacrifice their super soldiers and beat him to death themselves.

A gunshot rang out, close to them, cutting through the smoke. Peter froze and saw that Mysterio was right in front of him, also frozen in place. He looked down to see that the man’s middle was a gaping hole.

The Red Skull screamed behind him as Mysterio crumpled to the ground, revealing Deadpool, standing at the edge of the platform, giant gun in hand. Peter turned and kicked the Skull hard in the chest, sending him flying towards the railing. He shot out web and managed to catch him just as he was rocking over the side.

“Surely you don’t think I’d let you capture me, Spider-man,” Red Skull growled, clutching at Peter’s hands as he struggled to secure him to the railing.

Peter ignored him. He had no intention of killing him. He’d let the Red Skull make him a murderer before, and he would never do it again, though every part of his being wanted it.

He heard the sound of tearing material before he realized Red Skull had pulled a knife. There were very few types of metal that could cut his webbing, but of course the Skull would have access to such a thing.

“Are you crazy?” Peter shouted, scrabbling to keep him from falling.

Red Skull grabbed a fistful of his black shirt, bringing their faces close, and Peter looked into the manic red eyes. “You can’t ever undo what I’ve done to him.”

Then the Red Skull let go. Peter reached out but couldn’t stop him. He watched the body disappear quickly, falling down into the thick smoke.

He felt Deadpool approaching him, slowly. Peter turned around, and the assassin stopped.

“I knew that wasn’t you I was fighting,” he said, “whoever that was, wearing your spider get-up.”

Peter said nothing, just stared, tried to catch his breath.

“How did I know it wasn’t you?” Deadpool demanded. He lifted his giant gun, the one he’d just used to blow a hole in Mysterio, and pointed it at Peter’s head. “How?”

It was perfect, in a way – Deadpool would kill him now. Everyone he knew was dead and it was wrong for him to continue living here in a future he didn’t understand. Part of him wanted to live, mostly because the thought of Wade living on, trapped alone somewhere inside of Deadpool, was horrible. But he couldn’t think of a more appropriate way to go, not at this point. Red Skull had been right about one thing – he didn’t have the will to fight Deadpool.

Suddenly, Deadpool was moving towards him. Peter braced himself, but then Deadpool’s arms were around him. He held them stiffly, like he didn’t know what he was doing.

“Is this it?” he asked, haltingly. “Is this us?”

Peter couldn’t think. He rested his head against Wade’s chest, and it was Wade. His body remembered a hundred times that Wade had held him just like this – in an alley in Queens, in a tent in the desert –

“This is us,” Peter said, thickly. “Just like this.”

Wade’s body seemed to relax, to fit around Peter’s, remembering.

“Come with me,” Peter said, looking up at him.

The white, black-rimmed eyes stared down at him. “Where to?”

“Away, somewhere safe,” Peter said. “Please.”

He seemed to be holding his breath, and Peter thought he’d refuse, leave him here. “Okay,” he said, quietly.

They climbed down the scaffold quickly, covered by the smoke. Now that the other Avengers had arrived, the sounds of battle had died away. They would discover Red Skull’s corpse soon if they hadn’t already, and then Mysterio’s. Peter had spotted a Jeep at the edge of the compound, and he’d almost made it to the vehicle, pulling Wade behind him, when suddenly MJ Watson was in their path.

Peter’s heart swelled with joy to see her alive, then immediately sank. Only minutes ago, Wade had very nearly killed Gwen.

“MJ, please,” he said. “I’ll watch him, I promise—“

Her sharp eyes narrowed at them, scrutinizing, and he was reminded strongly again of Nat.

“Oh, no,” MJ said, suddenly sitting down on the ground. “Spider-man, you’ve knocked me out.”

Peter panted from the adrenaline and fear coursing through him, unable to form words. Was she hurt after all? He moved towards her.

“Goddamnit, Peter,” she said, holding out a hand to keep him back, “you’ve knocked me out. I bet I’ll only be unconscious for a few minutes.”

It took Peter another moment to understand what she wanted him to do. He really was thick sometimes.

“Thank you,” he said, squeezing her shoulder as he led Wade toward the car. “Tell, Gwen—“

“You watch your back around him,” she said, sternly. “SHIELD won’t let him go easily. I’d lose those the web shooters and anything else Tony gave you.”

That was simple enough to understand. Peter shucked off the web shooters, let them clatter to the ground, and pulled Wade into the Jeep, peeling away without even bothering to shut the doors. He suddenly remembered driving through the desert, Wade next to him, asking Peter to marry him.

“We’re gonna be okay,” he told Wade, shakily. “MJ and Gwen, they’ll make sure, and we won’t use our names and we’ll leave the country, don’t worry—“

“Who’s worried?” said Deadpool. Peter glanced over to see a strange, spooked look on the other’s face. “I’m with you, Webs.”

*~*~*

Peter found the satchel in May’s hope chest. He supposed there had been no point in hiding it more thoroughly – no one knew she was connected to the famous Spider-man, and the letters didn’t contain anything that wasn’t purely personal.

In the front of the satchel, there were several small books. Peter pulled one out and opened it to see Nat’s distinctive handwriting. An envelope was folded and tucked into the front cover, and he opened it to find a letter addressed to him.

_Pete – I’m so sorry that I had so much time with her when you couldn’t. She was wonderful. How’d you turn out such an angry little shit with a class act like her around? I’m gonna try my best to stick around until you show back up, but since not many people live to be 100, I hope this diary will be enough. You’d better have a good life and be happy or I’ll haunt your scrawny ass._

The diary was a record of every time Nat had visited May, at least once a month but much more often when she could make it. There were mentions of the others visiting her as well, nearly all of the original Avengers. Peter imagined his sweet aunt having tea with Logan and laughed to himself.

Nat had visited her from the day she’d broken the news to her about Peter and Wade until a few days before May died in her sleep. Peter let himself have a moment to hold the little book to his chest before putting it carefully back in the satchel.

He found Wade sitting in the sunroom, which had a view of the river. Peter liked to imagine May sitting in this room with this beautiful view. He believed MJ and Gwen would destroy the records of this place, cover them as best they could, but they still couldn’t stay here long. For today, though, they could rest here together.

Wade stared at the stacks of aged letters that Peter sat in front of him. “These are from me to you,” Peter explained, touching the larger stack first, “and these are from you to me. And these are from May to both of us, and these are the ones we wrote to her that she kept.”

He watched anxiously as Wade picked up the stack from him, thinking of what was in them. “You don’t have to read them,” Peter said.

“Why is your stack so much bigger than mine?” Wade frowned. “Was I too much of a fuck up to write to you?”

“No, no,” Peter said, taking Wade’s hand without thinking, “you were sick, you thought you were dying and you didn’t want to hurt me.”

It was strange, explaining away something that he was still fairly exasperated about. Wade didn’t seem to think much of his own reasoning.

“I do have cancer,” he muttered, “I just can’t die from it. Or anything, maybe.”

Peter rubbed his thumb over the scarred, broken skin of Wade’s hand. Moving slowly, he cupped Wade’s jaw with his other hand, feeling the same rough texture there, careful not to touch the red, angry spots. He remembered the explosion in the cave, seeing Wade’s skin burned and red, how awful it had been to think of him in pain.

“Does it hurt you?” Peter asked.

Wade blinked as if coming out of a dream. “My skin? Yeah.”

Peter sighed, running his fingers gently over his hairless head. “We’ll do something about that.”

“Nothing to do,” Wade said, suddenly taking Peter’s wrist. “Peter, you can’t – I’m not –“

He didn’t seem able to finish, but Peter had heard it before. He was no good. He ruined everything. He’d ruin Peter’s life and break his heart.

Peter laid his own hand over Wade’s. “You’re mine. You’re all I want. I love you.”

Wade stared at him, and Peter looked back into those gorgeous blue eyes that he would know anywhere. “You don’t have to say it back,” Peter said, “you don’t even have to stay with me if you don’t want to.”

Wade loosened his grip on his wrist, taking his hand instead. He leaned forward and tentatively laid a kiss on Peter’s knuckles. Peter swallowed against the lump in his throat. Then he leaned in, slowly, in case Wade wanted to stop him, and kissed him on the lips. Wade was still at first, but then he responded. Peter was reminded of their first kiss, years ago, Wade on his bed and Peter kneeling between his legs, begging him not to go.

“I don’t remember,” Wade said when they broke apart, “but I – you feel –“

Peter shushed him with another kiss. He knew.

Peter had planned on letting Wade rest and sleep, on giving him space and time to himself. But Wade took him into one of the bedrooms – the guest room, Peter realized, the one that they would have used if they had stayed in their right time and visited May here together – and made love to him. He was reluctant to let Peter see him, and Peter didn’t push. It was enough to have Wade touching him, to feel Wade come inside of him, to watch him come apart. He looked so different, and it hurt Peter’s heart, but he was also, in a way Peter didn’t quite understand, so recognizably Wade.

It rained hard that night. Peter thought of their cot in their tent, their home in the desert. He thought of all of their friends. He wished he could tell them what had happened. He wished he could go back to himself two months ago and tell him that he’d lie in bed with Wade again someday, with Wade’s head resting on his heart.

“What will we do tomorrow?”

“Read our letters, if you want,” Peter said, fingers grazing the scarred skin of his head. “We should probably get further away from New York. Maybe Canada?”

“I was born in Canada.”

Peter looked down at him. Wade looked a little spooked, like he had earlier in the Jeep when he’d repeated himself from long ago.

“That’s right,” Peter affirmed, kissing the top of his head, and Wade seemed to relax. Peter’s heart thrummed excitedly, and he tried to calm it, but he couldn’t help wondering what else Wade would remember soon.

Peter felt Wade shift and wrap his arm further around his waist, and he thought of his bed in the walk-up in Queens, Wade laying next to him, May and Ben down the hall, safe and sound. He fell asleep listening to the rain.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANK YOU to Bexorz and SpaceTrash (DesolateHappiness) for creating beautiful art for this fic!!!
> 
> THANK YOU to spideypoolfanfic.tumblr.com for organizing the Spideypool Prompt bang!!!
> 
> THANK YOU to notlucy for all her Stucky expertise! If you'd like to weep over sad Steve alone in the future, go read her Voyager series!
> 
> Here are two songs recommended by Bex and FloweryMusings (respectively) to listen to and cry while reading this fic:  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_PQ4fRQ5Kc  
> and  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHcunREYzNY
> 
> Tumble me: crockzilla.tumblr.com

**Author's Note:**

> I am so excited to finally get to start posting this!!!
> 
> I'll post one chapter each day for ten days, and eventually there will be beautiful art by bexorz and SpaceTrash!!!
> 
> Tumble me: crockzilla.tumblr.com


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